' THE REST IS MEMORY ' : BOOK REVIEW

 

' A MARCH OF HISTORICAL HORRORS ' : The author Lilly Tuck has range. She has written historical fiction set in South America - her novel '' The News From Paraguay '' won the National Book Award in 2004 - and low-key realist short stories about contemporary life.

These works move with ease and a kind of persuasive expat familiarity between the south of France; Thailand; Cambridge, Mass.; and a dude ranch in Nevada. Her prose style shifts with the subject matter but has also leaner over time; it runs closer to the bone.

Her new novel, '' The Rest is Memory,'' published after she turned 86, is set in Poland during World War II and follows a young Catholic girl, Czeslawa, into Auschwitz. It's a very different kind of historical fiction from '' The News from Paraguay '' but uses some of the same techniques :

Both books wear their research heavily because Tuck wants it to show. Part of the flavor of her style is a high fact content.

'' The Rest is Memory '' contains frequent footnotes to Tuck's historical sources [ '' Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp '' ], as well as an author's note that describes the seed of the project ; an obituary in The New York Times of the Polish photographer Wilhelm Brasse [ 1917-2012], ''who took over 40,000 pictures of the prisoners at Auschwitz.''

One of them was a 14-year-old girl named Czeslawa Kwoka.

Brasse himself is a character in the novel, though maybe ''character'' is the wrong word : Much of the prose is occupied by historical sketches, of people and towns and businesses.

Czeslawa grows up near Zamosc, '' a perfect example of a Renaissance town'' ; upon its founding in the late 16th century, immigrants, including Jews, were '' given equal rights '' and exempt from paying taxes for 25 years.

Later, the Germans renamed it Himmelstadt, after the Nazi politician.

We learn that the region is known for its slivovitz production, and digress, by way of Czeslawa's communion dress [ hand-sewn by her grandmother ], into a brief aside on the Polish tradition of lacemaking.

Every year, the village of Bobowa holds a bobbin lace festival. During the war, it was the site of one of the Germans' smaller concentration camps. ''No talk of lace-making then,'' Tuck comments.

Her subject, really, is not just Auschwitz but the deliberate decimation of a country's identity. She quotes a speech from Hitler: '' I have put my Death's Head formation at the ready with the command to send man, woman and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly.

Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans.'' Czeslawa is Tuck's imagined version of one of those children.

The World Students Society thanks Benjamin Markovits.