Whether written with the wax tablet of the ancients, an ink pen, a typewriter, or an electronic keyboard, the epistolary novel has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. The tradition that in modern times began in 1740, with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, has flourished more recently through the work of Thornton Wilder, Saul Bellow, Alice Walker, and John Updike. The advent of email and text messages is only the most recent threat to the canon of collected letters, but still the genre endures. Indeed, the British writer Robert Harris mixed real letters with fiction in his luminous Precipice, published just two years ago. Without the actual notes that the prime minister H. H. Asquith sent to his far younger paramour, Venetia Stanley, during the dangerous summer of 1914, the novel would not soar or sparkle as it does.
Letters from the Afterlife is not fiction, though its protagonists, survivors of the Lodz ghetto and the Bergen-Belsen...
David Marks Shribman teaches in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He won a Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 1995.
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