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| An insane desire to dance
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The hero of this story thinks he may be insane, or in any case that he suffers from a form of madness due to an excess of memory. However, is a madman who knows that he is mad really mad? Is it the 20th century with its array of tragedies misfortunes that drove us all to madness?
The story is set in the present in New York in the practice of a psychoanalyst where the madman has come to deliver himself of the ghosts which obscure his mind and dominate his madness.
“An insane desire to dance” is a historical novel in which Wiesel explores his memories of the 20th century and the tragedies that dominated it. A novel of self-discovery that delves into the darkest depths of the soul, “An insane desire to dance” is as an interior adventure driven by a desire for knowledge and the certainty that only love can cure the deepest wounds.
“In each one of my novels, there is a madman, always in a secondary role. In "An insane desire to dance", he has the main role. Madness has always fascinated me: it is the other side of culture, language and truth. It is the draw of the forbidden, not in a moral but in a human sense,” Wiesel told to the French magazine, Le Point.
“This fascination goes back to my childhood, in Transylvania, before the war. On Shabbat my sisters used to bring sweets to patients in the hospital, and my father visited the prisons,” Wiesel says.
“One day, he took me with him to the asylum and while he talked to doctors about how these miserable people could be helped, I just stood at the door, terrified at the spectacle. After the war in Paris, I followed lessons in psychopathology. Later, I wondered why madness interested me so much: I realised that it is because the world had become insane! History is dominated by currents of madness: the crusades were pure madness, the Inquisition too.
“And what can one say about the 20th century? Sometimes, I wonder what could have happened for the Jewish people to not only be a scapegoat, but to be seen as a target that needed to be eliminated? Madness is the wall I constantly run up.
“I wonder how I managed to remain sane, after having been thrown into cold and hunger, experiencing fear and abuse, and the screaming of the “Kapos” and the barking of the dogs? What saved me from madness, was my desire for knowledge. I friend, with whom I had to carry heavy stones. He was the director of Talmud school in Poland. I was always walking behind him while we worked, I only saw the back of his head, but we always recited the Talmud together.”
The American writer and Nobel prize winner Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Szighet, Hungary. As a Jew, he was sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald where he witnessed the death of all his relatives. At the end of the war, he arrived in Paris, where he studied journalism at the Sorbonne. Later he settled in New York and taught in Boston. He dedicated his life to the fight against racism and discrimination.
“An insane desire to dance” by Elie Wiesel is published at Seuil editions.
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