The Seventh Well by Fred Wander

Skip to product information
1 of 1

The Seventh Well by Fred Wander

Regular price
Checking stock...
Regular price
Checking stock...
Summary

'A remarkable addition to Holocaust literature' Literary Review

The feel-good place to buy books
  • Free delivery in Australia
  • Supporting authors with AuthorSHARE
  • 100% recyclable packaging
  • Proud to be a B Corp – A Business for good
  • Buy-back with Ziffit

The Seventh Well by Fred Wander

The Seventh Well is a short autobiographical novel, its loose, episodic chapters covering the period of 1942-5, which the author spent in German concentration camps. Flashbacks recall his early internment in France, and the book closes with the liberation of Buchenwald in April 1945. Rather than focus on his own story though, Fred Wander describes the lives and deaths of his fellow internees - the creative power of his story-telling invests their deaths with dignity and keeps their memories alive. It was first published in 1971, then reissued with a new afterword to great acclaim in Germany in 2005, the year before the author died aged ninety. This new translation by acclaimed translator and poet Michael Hofmann captures the power and physicality of his language.
Of all the accounts I have read of survival in the Nazi laager.. few approach Wander's for the quality of its writing or its civilised mission to bear witness. The book's limpid, clean-cut narrative creates an extraordinary sense of communion and intimacy with the reader. Exquisitely translated by Michael Hofmann, The Seventh Well is not a memoir; it is a work of art -- Ian Thomson * Guardian *
Prose of spectacular, often Biblical beauty ... It is beautiful and strange; rich in those moments, those passing observations of joy as well as horror, that cause the reader to stop and grasp that this is what it was like to wander through hell - and then survive carrying a powerful clutch of stories -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *
The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, translated by Michael Hofmann, is that book which makes the world tilt on its axis; it makes you say: Oh, now I see ...! It made me glad that, for once in my life, I'd been forced to do something I didn't want to -- Julie Burchill * Observer *
It is extraordinary that it has taken almost four decades for a book of such undeniable importance to finally be published in English ... Like all great Holocaust writing, The Seventh Well is a book of powerful testimony and defiance * Herald *
FRED WANDER was born in Vienna in 1916. He survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald and several other concentration camps. In 1955, he moved to the GDR to study at the Literature Institute in Leipzig, returning to Vienna in 1980.He received the Theodor Kramer Prize in 2003.Fred Wander died in 2006. MICHAEL HOFMANN is the highly acclaimed translator of Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Kafka and Brecht and the author of several books of poems and a book of criticism. He lives in London and Hamburg.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781847080677
ISBN 10 1847080677
Title The Seventh Well
Author Fred Wander
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Granta Books
Year published 2009-02-01
Number of pages 176
Prizes Winner of Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize., Short-listed for Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2010 (UK)
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable