books

Michiko Kakutani's review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland makes me want to stroll the streets of this city that I love so much (not now, it's cold and rainy), though not necessarily in search of the kind of companion O'Neill's protagonist finds. I'd rather read about losing oneself in depression and finding oneself with unsavory characters and shady business ventures than actually experience it for myself, and perhaps reading about it is one way of staving off the temptation to slip into a world like that, because it is tempting, one thinks to oneself, reading the opening passages of the novel, identifying with the feeling of one's relationship with another person being misunderstood, with how tiresome it is to have to explain oneself, to put it into words. Even all the descriptions of cricket - a sport I know almost nothing about - seem, from the first few pages I was able to read, essential to understanding how the narrator feels about New York, about the Old World and the New, about community, about living in the city, about living in different cities. I'll add it to that indescribably long list of books I want to read.

A book which was recommended to me by a very dear friend recently, and which I read immediately, was The Boy in Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. There were things I liked about the book and things I didn't particularly care for, some of which may be simply matters of personal taste, I suppose. Long story as short as I can make it (*spoilers abounding*), a nine-year-old German boy named Bruno moves with his family from Berlin to Oświęcim (Auschwitz) when his commandant father is transferred there by Hitler ("the Fury"), and in his naive boredom, Bruno goes exploring along a very long fence and meets another nine-year-old boy - the boy in striped pyjamas - named Shmuel on the other side of that fence. They meet almost every day for a year, and then Shmuel brings Bruno a set of striped pyjamas so he can disguise himself and help Shmuel look for his father in the camp. They get caught up in a march, the march goes into a room, "chaos" follows, and Bruno is never seen again.

I liked the plot, and I liked that the reader knows more than the protagonist. And obviously the book isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at a teenaged audience, but I thought the main character not knowing more than he did was a little over the top. But that may have been the point, I totally get that, that we're meant to feel really uncomfortable with the fact that he just never catches on despite repeated clues, but it made me wonder whether he wasn't immature for nine or not very bright. I get that he's sheltered and on the offensive's side (a victim would better know what was going on, perhaps?), but several of the things that are conspicuously omitted - like the word used by several adults to refer to the Jews, or the correct pronunciation of Auschwitz (although I did think "Out With" was clever at the beginning), or what he witnesses when the family's waiter spills something on a young lieutenant at dinner - made me feel less sympathetic toward him. I guess it made me judge him, probably more than I should have, though certainly not enough that the ending was acceptable, that he somehow deserved to die or anything. But it made me feel like he wasn't trying to understand what was going on around him, as one description of the book suggested.

Similarly, I wondered how Shmuel didn't know more than he did. How did he not know where the people were going when they went, that they were being killed? People were being shot out in the open, it's not like they were only going to the incinerator, and a nine-year-old in Auschwitz would have been a lot hipper to what was going on than a nine-year-old on the outside, certainly, I mean, just from what I remember of Survival in Auschwitz, it seems that a kid would have been a part of the whole bartering system that sprang up as a means of survival in the camps, would have had to get in on the game, to fend for themselves, even a child such as Shmuel who was with his father and grandfather. Also, style-wise, though I am ordinarily a fan of repetition, I didn't care for how Boyne uses repetition here. The whole "mouth in the shape of an O" thing was especially grating, and some of the Britishisms (though I don't have a problem with Britishisms in general, of course) seemed entirely out of place since the main characters are German.

I don't know, I can only imagine how difficult it is to write a holocaust book for kids, but I read Night by Elie Wiesel when I was twelve, in school, as did the entire class, and while Night is completely horrific (there are certain images I will never get out of my head), I think that it is impossible to not portray that time as horrific, and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas seemed to gloss over too many things for my taste. Honestly, I felt that it was unrealistic to the point of inaccuracy. The characters seemed kind of flat, even considering we're looking at them through Bruno's eyes - his sister goes from playing with dolls to fawning over the lieutenant (who paid a little too much attention to her, if you ask me, for such an age difference and the fact that he is a child playing a man's role, trying to be seen as older by the adults around him) to poring over the newspaper and keeping track of troop movements on a map, and I just didn't believe it.

So overall I didn't particularly care for it, but it did have its redeeming qualities, the doctor/waiter, the maid, the distance between what we know and what Bruno doesn't - but I think I would have liked a little more clarity at the end, even with Bruno and Shmuel being swept up into a march that leads them to the gas chamber, I wanted a clearer message, something other than the wry "nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age," that seemed like a cop-out to me. What exactly couldn't happen again? Or could? Or is? Children getting caught up in war? Children connecting despite being on opposite sides of a fence, metaphorical or otherwise? Senselessness and human stupidity? Okay, sure, but I just feel like the author is winking at me, and I don't feel like it's an appropriate topic to wink about. We're expected to have far more information than the book provides, and I think it invites us to backshadow (see Michael Andre Bernstein's Foregone Conclusions), to read the events as if they had to have happened or as if those involved should have known better, to judge the characters, and if it went a few steps further and tried to make the reader aware of the fact that they were judging when they shouldn't be, that would be entirely different, but I just don't think it gets to that point.

Currently I'm read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, which is pretty fantastic, and next up is The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno. I should probably be reading more Russian lit in preparation for my trip to Petersburg, by I got sort of stuck on a particularly uninteresting Mandelstam selection in the anthology I was muddling my way through. Some of it is breathtaking, don't get me wrong, but some of it I just don't care for. Some of the poetry especially, I'm sure it is absolutely beautiful in Russian, but it loses something. And, of course, considering that I think I want to study translation, being continually reminded that something inherent to the art is lost when it is filtered into another tongue is disheartening, to say the very least. It also makes me want to keep studying languages, though, so there's that.

And this is completely random, but I'm listening to it at the moment, so I'll say that Claude Debussy's "Clair de lune" is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.