The Lost

 In France The Lost only came out last September. I bought it practically straight away after reading a complimentory book review. However I wanted to have time to read it properly so I waited until the October break to start the book. I finished it over a month ago and it is still haunting me. Not because of the horrors it evokes; the author develops some of them but not much and never really at lenghth. But because of Daniel Mendelsohn’s tour de force in managing to deal with so many topics while attempting to understand and record what happened to six members of his family during WWII.If, like me, you have read a few books about the Shoah will not really learn anything new but you will learn how to look at things you think you know from a different perspective. You will have a different outlook on your relationship with your siblings, on your family history, on your personal history and how you relate to it, on historical events in general. I feel the list could go on and on. A French literary magazine has put the book in its top-ten book list for 2007 and I certainly cant’ agree more.