The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

A review by John Broening

In a sadly prescient essay about the Italian writer and concentration camp survivor Primo Levi written some years before his own progressive enfeeblement and death, Tony Judt declared: "He was revolted at the notion . . . that he had survived for some transcendent purpose, been 'chosen' to testify. The romantic idea that suffering ennobles, that the very extremeness of the camp experience casts light on quotidian existence by stripping away illusion and convention, struck him as an empty obscenity."

Perhaps the idea that suffering ennobles is a romantic delusion: however, occasionally we are lucky to have writers like Judt who, because of their strength of character and the force of their intellect are, if not ennobled by suffering and dying, able to endure them by keeping the core of their being and their creative spirit intact. Furiously driven by what is literally a deadline, they produce, in their final years, their best and most lasting work.

In 2008, Judt, a well-regarded ...

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