Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wiesel, Elie (Vol. 165) - Carole J. Lambert (review date summer 2001)


Wiesel, Elie (Vol. 165) - Carole J. Lambert (review date summer 2001)

Carole J. Lambert (review date summer 2001)

SOURCE: Lambert, Carole J. Review of And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969-, by Elie Wiesel. Southern Humanities Review 35, no. 3 (summer 2001): 301-04.

[In the following favorable review of And the Sea Is Never Full, Lambert maintains that Wiesel “succeeds in humbly but honestly presenting himself as, indeed, a survivor who has circumnavigated both the camps and world political intrigues with his values intact and his wisdom ready to be shared with others.”]

It is very difficult for a novelist, biographer, or memoirist to portray a genuinely good person in an interesting way. Denied the shocking marital infidelities and political scandals that create best-selling “pathography,” this beneficent protagonist's evolution from childlike innocence to sophisticated integrity, seasoned by bitter months in concentration camps, should not be a bestseller. Nevertheless,...

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