I’m apprehensive picking up this book. For one, I saw the movie in Netflix some time ago and I really thought it wasn’t great. Like, it wasn’t shit, but it wasn’t great. I thought the book will be much the same. Secondly, having children as our main lens in the story is usually more miss than hit. I find the perspective of children grating and cringeworthy, like that Donoghue book Room which I really fucking hate. Thankfully, Boyne manages well through the eyes of Bruno, our young protagonist.
The Fury Arrives
Bruno’s dad just landed the big guns, the Fury (that’s the Führer mind you), came for dinner and thought that Bruno’s dad was the hottest thing since sliced bread. His promotion isn’t really a blessing though, as he’s got an important job at hand — the extermination of the Jewish populace. Bruno and his sister weren’t too crash hot about leaving Berlin. Bruno’s got his three mates and the city isn’t such a bad place to live. Sure enough, they hated the place when they got there, a place called “out-with” (that’s Auschwitz mind you). It was a bit rough, to put it mildly.
On the other side of the fence, a bunch of people wearing pajamas are lurching around, most not doing much at all. They look a bit sad too. These pajama-wearers sometimes come to the house to help around, but mainly the soldiers hang about the house, and they’re absolute dicks to these jim-jam cladded individuals. Bruno quickly become bored, and decided to revive his career in exploration. Sure enough, he goes straight toward the fences that separate his house and the camp, where he met a boy who was a shadow…
Another tearjerker Nazi novel tugging your heartstrings
There has been a recent flurry of books which revolves around the times of Nazi Germany that enjoys bestseller status that they’re a penny a dozen. Whether they’re any good I can’t say as I’m a little skeptical of them. But this book reminded me of another book that got me into reading back when I was in uni — The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I doubt that I would be as blown away now reading it than I was then, but I enjoyed it for what it was. Both of these books pull at your heartstrings, or at least try to, and if I were in my early twenties I might have been duped for it. Perhaps I’ve grown more cynical now. Books that try too hard to press the emotions out of you tend to ruin the novel and whatever original intention the author had.
That’s not to say these books are bad. I thought that The Boy with the Striped Pajamas was fine — it was well written, the family drama is unexpectedly compelling, Bruno as a central character easily carries the novel. We see Nazi Germany through the gaps of knowledge in a child, and respect the questions that Bruno asks his parents, the mistaken definition of things. Bruno mistakenly thought the “foreseeable future” as three weeks, as it seems to be longer than two weeks but not as long as a month (after all who wanted to stay in Auschwitz for longer than a month?). The conversation he had with his father on why they are now living in Auschwitz seemed to Bruno as a punishment from the Fury instead of a badge of honour — something that doesn’t make sense to a child, and to be fair, something that seems absurd to us as well now.
It is a brisk novel to read, and I would say that this is its biggest weakness. 500 pages would’ve been too much, but just over 200 pages is a mere blink. My missus read this in half a night, I finished this during a working day. You can argue that the writing is fine that the book breezes through, but I wasn’t overwhelmed by any great emotions after this book was done, despite the devastating ending. But it seems to have done to a whole lot of other people who read this book, so good for them. Credit where credit’s due: it is better than what I anticipated to be.
