SOURCE: “The Last of the Just: Between Borges and Garcia Marquez,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 4, Autumn, 1985, pp. 517-24.

In the following essay, Menton discusses the influence of Latin-American magic-realist writers on André Schwarz-Bart's novel Le dernier des Justes.

André Schwarz-Bart's Le dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just), an outstanding novel of the Holocaust and recipient of the 1959 French Prix Goncourt, is not only a prime example of magic realism but also provides a link between two of the tendency's most famous Latin American practitioners, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. Hailed by critics upon its publication, The Last of the Just as late as 1963 was called by Pierre de Boisdeffre one of the most significant novels of the preceding twenty years, along with The Plague by Albert Camus. However, in the ensuing twenty years, Schwarz-Bart's novel seems to have fallen victim...