Word: castillos
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Child of Our Time, by Michel del Castillo. A childhood in Europe's concentration camps recalled with heart-rending in tensity by a boy who lived through...
...Frank, this story takes its unproclaimed text from the New Testament: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones ... it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." The offense against Author del Castillo (who calls himself Tanguy in this autobiographical novel) began with the Spanish Civil War. At the age of three he saw corpses in the streets of Madrid, an omen of the dread commonplaces that would haunt his boyhood. Though his mother was a militant left-wing journalist, the Communists shortly...
...wept, sickened, and gradually lost control of their natural functions. Tanguy kept up his courage by believing that it was all a "mistake," and that once the authorities found out that he was not Jewish they would send him back to his mother. The word "mistake" recurs through Del Castillo's book and picks up the same rhetorical power and irony that the words "honourable men" do in Mark Antony's funeral oration, rising at last to an almost cosmic indictment of a universe in which such monstrous "mistakes" can happen...
...mother, who also turned up in Paris, had equally little use for him. She was still a left-winger, lost in the intellectual Minotaur's cave of the '30s. At novel's end, with a wistful touch of Chaplinesque pathos, the 25-year-old Del Castillo, currently living in Paris, asks, "What is to become of Tanguy now?" and offers the shadow of a hope that he may "even come to find life the wonder and delight it should be; who knows...
...artlessness with which Author del Castillo achieves a child's angle of vision makes his boy-hero Tanguy one of the most endearing and poignant figures in recent fiction. Child of Our Time is both a grim and a grand commentary on the human condition. The first response to this book is elemental-to weep. The second response is to marvel that Michel del Castillo endured what he did, and that, having endured, he could still forgive so much that is eternally unforgivable...