Dry heave city.

Have you seen the news?

The Irish Children's Book of the Year is...

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

I swear, I'm not joking.  Not even a little bit. 

I guess I could have understood a win if it'd been the ONLY children's book by an Irish writer to come out last year, but that obviously isn't the case.  Cripes, I probably would have voted for the new Artemis Fowl book over BISP.  Blecch. 

Comments

[Kelly]

What about "The New Policeman"?!? Didn't that come out in 2006. And it's an awesome book.

[Leila]

That was the one I immediately thought of, too, but I'm pretty sure it came out in '05 over there.

[hope]

I know you hate BITSP. I've seen your hate. But I haven't seen you explain WHY you hate. Could you elaborate? I know why I didn't like enjoy it. (I would say that it is because I hate morality plays --- but I probably would have liked the old morality plays on the backs of carts rolling from town to town back before, you know, TV.) What I hate are books that have evolved from the morality plays. bleh. Go preach to somebody else, I say. But that's just me. I'm not a fan of adolescent problem novels, either, but I can look at Chris Crutcher and say "wow, that's a guy doing the angsty-emo, dead girlfriend, screwed up family, racism, stupid people thing really well."

So do you also just hate the whole preachy book genre, or do specifically toss over BITSP?

[Leila]

I thought the main character acted a good deal younger than nine, I hated that the wordplay (Out With, the Fury) was English wordplay, since one would assume that they'd be speaking German, and for that matter, I couldn't buy the idea that the kid that age wouldn't know that Hitler was called the Fuehrer, and I had a hard time buying that he, as the son of the guy running Auschwitz, would have absolutely no clue about what went on there.

That's it, mostly. It just made me go, "GAH!"

[hope]

Well, it didn't make me go, GAH as much, "Oh, Bite me," for the reasons I mentioned above, but the things you mentioned didn't bother me so much. In the same way that I wouldn't read aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper and complain that ants and grasshoppers would never share their food and that whole store up food for winter idea is pretty stupid if you die at the end of summer.

[Colleen]

I just saw the book as a big adult indulgence. There has been a lot of well written Holocaust literature for children and young adults but this one read like the author thinking "how can I write a book about it that will appeal to adults - that will make us feel better? Give us an innocent child, give us a burgeoning friendship, give us an inside look at that time and place but turn it all on its ear by making the Nazi kid the innocent.

Oh won't it be amazing? Won't it be fresh? Won't it be new?

We will turn Holocaust literature on its ear with this one!!!"

Indulgence, plain and simple.

[bookbk]

Not to mention that a lot of it was just plain WRONG. As in, totally inaccurate. Like, children at Auschwitz? Living children? Not so much. And I just kept thinking that if little whatsisname could climb in under that fence, couldn't Shmuel, skeletal as he was, climb OUT? And run away and join the partisans or something? I mean, sure, lots of reasons why not, but still, wouldn't either them even think of it?

And I get that it's supposed to be a "fable" and not a naturalistic story. But really that seemed like a cop-out. That afterward could've been filled with "actually, this is what really happened..." instead of vague sentimental platitudes.

[hope]

This is why I feel uncomfortable about the response to the book. I don't think it's about the holocaust. I don't think it was meant to be about the holocaust. Not even a little. Like, TOTALLY NOT ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST. Which is why the author made it so unrealistic-- so no one could possibly think this was a story of real events. I feel like the American audience missed the ball on this one, totally whiffed it. The preachy little message just shot right past the bat, untouched. I don't like the book because I think preaching is easy and it doesn't impress me much, but ever since I read the book, I've wondered if I should say something about it. It's not like I want to defend the work, and maybe my interpretation is the totally clueless one. Anyway, I couldn't stand it anymore, so I posted. I hope you don't mind.

[bookbk]

Okay, yeah, I think so too. But at the same time? It *is* about the Holocaust. I mean, the setting he chooses to hang his preaching on is this extremely Holocaust-like, if inaccurate, setting. So you can't blame people for being somewhat confused. I think the book deliberately fosters that confusion by hitching an unearned ride on a highly loaded and sort of...what...*valorized* topic. So it goes like this: Nobody doesn't agree that the Holocaust was bad, right? So therefore, if you write a book showing how bad the Holocaust (or something sort of resembling the Holocaust but INACCURATELY) was, than your book must be good!

[hope]

This might be harsh and I apologize. If it IS harsh, it is only because I'm trying to keep the post short.

The book isn't about the holocaust, and it isn't about how this thing that *looks like the holocaust* is bad like the holocaust. It's about how America is the new Third Reich. The book is supposed to be a story for our time. Our time isn't the holocaust. The holocaust is history. It doesn't feel that way, really, not with new books coming out every year and the persistance of war in the middle of east, but still, the holocaust is history. The author is using the emotional response to an ugly event from history to tell us a story about our time. He doesn't want facts, he wants the emotion, that's why the facts aren't there, just the allusions.

Leila says the nine year old narrator is an idiot. Yes, he is. And that nine year old reader is YOU. He's so stupid he can't see auschwitz happening in his front yard. Whereas you are so stupid you can't see what is happening in your own living room. Doesn't Iraq appear there every night? Here are the most horrific events in our world appearing right in front of you, thanks to televesion, and you can't see those people behind the fence in Guantanamo? The author put a concentration camp in the front yard because he wants you to realize that there's really no excuse for not seeing the atrocities right in front of us.

It isn't about making the Nazi child innocent. It's about making you culpable. It isn't about the holocaust. It's about today, right now. Just like Aesop's fable isn't about a wolf and a dog, or an ant and a grasshopper. This is about blind stupidity, ours, the Americans. No wonder the Irish love it. No wonder it's a big hit in Britain. They all got it. We didn't. This is a bitter condemnation of U.S. self-interest, and willful blindness. The Irish all see it as a book about americans, while americans are dismissing it because dudh, out-with is a compilation of two english words that in german wouldn't sound like auschwitz, and they think that's really dumb. I think the holocaust is more present for the americans, we're still wallowing it, while the europeans are doing everything they can to squish it farther into the past. The europeans have moved on, because they have really wanted to move on. so they see the metaphor where we see bad historical fiction.

Is there a one-to-one correlation in the metaphor? I wouldn't think so, because even a hack should know that everything shouldn't be too pat. But there are enough lessons packed in there. The bitchy wife who just wants to get back to her nice house--there you have all those people who don't care about anything except their taxes going up. The father who doesn't care about all the dead people until his own son dies--the US is still counting American dead, but not even guessing at the numbers of Iraq dead. Does Shmuel know he can't get out? That he's trapped and about to die? Is that why he invites the child of the Nazi Camp Director inside the fence? Is he a disenfranchised suicide bomber of a "friend." I'm not sure, because I haven't read the book closely enough because I agree that the book is self-indulgent. It's just easy to rake up the emotions with references to the holocaust and preach to people about how they are stupid and should somehow DO BETTER. I don't read books for their pat little lessons. I can get my morality plays from the NYT.

[hope]

okay, so that was a lame attempt at keeping a post short. sorry.

[Leila]

Wowza. That did turn into a long one, didn't it? Never a need to apologize for length, though.

I hadn't run across that reading of the book, even though I've read (what feels like) zillions of reviews and responses to it (pro and con).

I do think, though, like Cheryl at Brooklyn Arden*, that allegory has to work on both levels -- fiction and symbol. And, from what I read of it, I felt it failed as fiction in a Big Way.

*Thanks to Fuse for that link.

[bookbk]

Hmm... John Boyne may well have meant the book to be an indictment of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, or at least of human indifference to evil generally, but my impression from looking at the reviews on amazon.co.uk is that the British readers do indeed think they're reading a novel about the Holocaust. And many of them opine that it's helped them learn about and understand that chapter in history as they never have before. (Of course they're learning about an INACCURATE version of it, but whatever.)

In any case, none of the 46 reviews mentioned Iraq or the United States or any contemporary event, that I noticed. So I don't think that's why it's so popular there. I'm not sure why it is; anyone else have any ideas?

[Colleen]

If indeed he meant the book to be about current events the he should not have used anything even closely resembling the Holocaust as his allegory. It's too big, it's pretty much the biggest tragedy in recorded human history, and you can't use it or anything remotely like it to mean something else. Auschwitz is only Auschwitz and that is all it will ever be. If you want to tell a story about today, then use something else - use anything else.

And please - even the title smacks of the Holocaust (the real Holocaust). They don't wear striped pajamas in Guantamo or Abu Ghraib or any other prison that has been in the news. Striped pajamas were the Nazi concentration camps. And using that title immediately conjures that image.

Science fiction writers do this sort of thing all the time Hope - set a story in a fictional town, planet, time, etc. to tell the story of current events. If that is what the author wanted to do here (and I would commend him for that sort of story although I didn't see it) he should not have chosen this particular point in history to do it. It is too distracting and readers will often not separate one from the other. (British and Irish audiences might just be enjoying it as a Holocaust story after all.)

The Holocaust is just too damn big and horrific; you can't use it for anything other than it's own stories.

[hope]

colleen,
I think that it is what Boyne was trying to do-- using the Holocaust to stand in for "all human indifference to evil" as bookbk said. And I don't think we are far enough away from the Holocaust for that attempt at allegory to work, as you said, it's too distracting. you can plug whatever you like into the allegory, it doesn't have to be abu ghraib, or guantanamo specifically, but I do think it is supposed to be preaching to us in the present day, not be an apologist view of german history, as some people take it for.

[Colleen]

You know what's funny - I didn't see it as an apologist for German history either. I don't have a problem with the fact that many Germans had no clue that the Holocaust was going on; I'm reviewing an adult memoir right now that says just that.

If Boyne was really doing this then I wonder why on earth he did it this way or why his editors thought it would be a good time in history to use. On the one hand we still have many books being written about Holocaust that are just that - about the Holocaust and then on the other hand authors who want to use it as an allegory for something else? Odd, to say the least.

A better choice would have been something much more underwritten in western literature - the Armenian genocide during the WWI era, the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot (very recent but rarely written about) or how about the targeting of Jews by the Spanish Inquisition? Sadly, there are a ton of places to look for tragedy of this nature in history and any one of them would seem to be a better choice than the Holocaust.

I think we will have to agree to disagree on what Boyne's intent was though, Hope - I just don't see it and I should be able to. I write about war a lot (Leila will attest to that) and I'm working on a feature right now on an adult book about Abu Ghraib. In other words, I am not blind to the horrors of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. And this allegory completely missed me.

I wish I could see it the way you do.

Thanks for the spirited conversation though!

[hope]

thank you to you colleen, and to leila for providing the space for the conversation. I really am the only person who reads the book this way, from what i can tell of amazon reviews, and it was good to have a chance to talk to someone else about it.