September 21, 2014
Well, I at least accomplished one goal today: making a second blog post. This book was the hard copy that I've been reading at home. I was specifically previewing it as a possible text to teach. It's available through the local education agency. Now, my first choice for a book to teach about the Holocaust would be Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, obviously, but for some reason, that one isn't available. So I figured, this particular book is fairly recent, written for a young adult audience, and prior to reading it (or reading any scathing reviews on Goodreads), I'd only heard good things. Now that I've finished it, I may still use it...but perhaps to teach students how to critique literature, and with lots of front loading.
This book was obviously written with good intentions, but it wasn't all that it could have been. Boyne can say whatever he wants about how Bruno is supposed to be naïve, but I still don't think he's a plausible character. The book overall could have worked if a few changes were made to the characters and/or setting:
-Bruno is a nine-year-old German boy, and the son of a Nazi Commandant. It's the early 1940s; it's highly doubtful that Bruno wouldn't know who Hitler is, and that he wouldn't have been indoctrinated into the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. In fact, the story would have been much more poignant, as well as realistic, if he had been. His friendship with Shmuel would have been all the more powerful, especially Bruno's realization that they're fundamentally the same. Since Bruno in the book doesn't even know what a "Jew" is, he doesn't even know that he's "supposed" to be superior. Bruno, infantile as he was (the confusion with "the Fury" and "Out-With" makes no sense because he's a German speaker!), was pretty fucking annoying at times. His character as a nine-year-old would only make sense if he were mentally handicapped or something, which would have been very interesting for the son of a prominent S.S. officer.
-Boyne could have made this work if he'd simply made Bruno younger, like five or six. Not much else in the story would have needed to be changed.
-Shmuel should have been older. He survived for more than a year at Auschwitz. A little kid allowed to live that long in the most notorious of the death camps? Yeah, I don't think so. Of course, maybe the story should have been set in a concentration camp instead. There are differences between the two ideas. Give the book a different setting, and many issues would have been resolved, I think.
It seems to me like Boyne did not do his homework before writing this novel. That's too bad. If he had a clue, he could have written a much better book. The premise of a Nazi officer's son and a prisoner becoming friends is interesting, but the execution left much to be desired. I'm told that the movie attempts to fix some of these problems, so I guess I will have to see for myself.
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