Aug 20 2008
Dawn by Elie Wiesel
Dawn
By Elie Wiesel
Book Review by Nicole LaMarco
Weisel’s writing is amazing to read. He strings words together like a beautiful rhythm where you do not want to stop because you might break that rhythm. However, when you return to reading the story you find that the same rhythm is still there and that brings about a sense of relief and familiarity.
Wiesel was way ahead of his time when he wrote these two books. The way he switches so effortlessly between the current time in the book and the past story of the main characters is sweet and so entertaining. In this sense, Wiesel’s writing reminds me of the way Quentin Tarantino puts together scenes in his movies – where there is a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. It keeps the reading interesting and up to speed with your thought pattern as you are reading.
I am amazed at how Weisel is able to put the simplest words together to make the most wonderful prose. He truly is a storyteller and has the incredible talent to do so.
Dawn is a novel about a young boy (Elisha) who has been through the holocaust, lost his family, and then is made a fighter in the resistance. He fights with teams, together in the night. They take orders and go on missions to take down the military. However, now he finds himself waiting for dawn to arrive because he has been ordered to execute a British man. There are no more groups fighting in the dark, it is just he and another man condemned to death. Elisha is now faced with fears, old memories, and even the dead who are there to help him through this.
Weisel is an amazing writer with true talent for words. He brings life to his story so easily with his descriptions. Dawn focuses on the changing of a boy – how a boy can change and know he will change with what is to come, with his actions. I found a greater theme in this book I like to call kill or be killed, and the boy in this book encounters this at all levels. He becomes the boy who must kill or be killed, however, the boy feels so many different things in his world. They bring sense to a world filled with death, destruction and chaos, and at the same time it merely discusses how death affects us.
Weisel’s storytelling is amazing in that once you begin to read one line of his work you will have this feeling inside yourself that will not allow you to stop reading until there is nothing left to read. Although this story is focused on one main event of a boy’s life, Weisel can fill a novel with the boy’s feelings, thoughts, inner uproar, and regret. Although this story is about a moment in history we would all like to forget about, it takes us right to the people who had been there and lost everything. They not only lost the lives of their loved ones, they lost hope, a desire for life, and gained an incredible insight to life, mankind, and the workings of all men as a whole. This boy, at such a young age, has the thoughts and feelings of a much older man. What he experiences is the things we experience when we can look at life knowing all too well about the inevitable death that walks within us all. The struggles this boy goes through and creates for himself are fascinating, as we have all experienced some type of suffering at one point or another. We can all relate to this boy with his grown up feelings and thoughts. We can all learn from his actions and experiences.
Sometimes I will get frustrated reading a book because of the way it begins or ends, but Weisel knows mankind more than he would like to, I think. Even with what is going on today – what we see on the news, what we hear on the radio – it can all be related to what Weisel is telling us in this book called Dawn.
