L.R. Burt

Tuesday night Mr. Burt and I passed a half hour or so catching up on all the latest movie trailers on Apple Trailers.  One film caught my attention, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which is (in the most un-spoilery summary I can muster) a story about the Holocaust through the eyes of a young German boy whose father is a high Nazi official.  The preview looked great, and the movie is on my list of Upcoming Films I Definitely Want To See Assuming They Get Decent Reviews, as I’ve always been fascinated by World War II in general and the Holocaust in particular.   (Somehow, though, I’ve managed not to have seen Schindler’s List yet; I intend to, it’s just that it’s not really the kind of movie you just pick when you’re in the mood for a movie.)

Anyway…

In checking IMDB for the release date of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, I saw, not surprisingly, that it’s based on a book.  A young adult book by John Boyne.  Immediately I searched for it in the Carrollton Public Library’s online card catalogue, and was delighted to find a copy available.  I picked it up yesterday and read it in a few hours.

As expected, the book provided a unique and compelling perspective of the Holocaust.  I was especially moved by the tentative exploration of the duplicitous nature of a person who can be a father who is loved and respected and thought of as good by his children while simultaneously being capable of committing the worst sorts of atrocities against humanity as a concentration camp commander.  Holocaust stories always make you shake your head in disbelief at how something so patently evil could have been embraced on such a massive scale, how people could just let it happen.  It is that inability to really wrap your mind around such a horrible thing that John Boyne capitalizes on in this novel, the shades of grey in which life is painted and people are forced to make moral choices, that innate human naivety so aptly captured in the point of view of a nine year-old boy, which unlike other Holocaust fiction I’ve read, made the stealth campaign of fascist propaganda finally click for me.  That’s how they did it.

I don’t really mean this post to be a book review, nor do I really mean it to be a grim Holocaust post (I realize how messed up it is to have a post tagged with both “the holocaust” and “silliness”), but I will ad that when I reviewed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas on Facebook’s Visual Bookshelf application, I gave it 3 1/2 out of 5 stars.  I wish I could say exactly why, but I can’t quite pinpoint it any more precisely than I simply didn’t finish it and say wow, as I’ve said about so many other books lately.  As much as some of the scenes resonated with me (the movie’s still on my list of Upcoming Films I Definitely Want To See Assuming They Get Decent Reviews), I felt there was something lacking.  The ending is disturbing — though I’m not sure if that’s exactly why the books as a whole didn’t  mesh for me, because Holocaust stories are inherently disturbing.  It might have been the pacing that didn’t quite work for me in the end.  It might also have been that the scenario itself contradicts other Holocaust fiction I’ve read and requires a level of suspension of disbelief I wasn’t entirely able to achieve.

Overall, I really liked the book, am glad I read it, and recommend it highly, because it is very moving and original and impeccably written and does contain a lot of themes that really resonate with importance and relavence to our times, and I’d like to talk about it with other people.

All that to say…

This foray into Holocaust fiction, which I haven’t taken since I was a teenager, inspired me to pick up The Zion Covenant series by Bodie Thoene.   I read the books more than ten years ago and loved them and have thought about them, and the characters, often since then.

(I sort of have a Books I Want and Need to Read list, but I don’t really stick by it, because I’m very much a mood reader.  I have to read what I want, when I want, even if I’m in the middle of another book or there’s a book someone has told me I have to read.  Probably this is because I was an English major who spent 3 1/2 years being forced to read things I didn’t necessarily care to read, in impossible amounts of time, to the extent that after I graduated, I didn’t pick up a book except Harry Potter for a good year.  I was ruined for reading, but I’m recovering and devouring books.  Or maybe I just have a Veruca Salt “Daddy I Want an Oompa Loompa Now” personality, as I eat like this, too.)

Once again, the Carrollton Public Library came through for me, though I approached the first book, Vienna Prelude, with no little trepidation.  Before I even got to the library, I was hesitant to re-read the books because obviously as an English major and a writer I’ve grown as a reader since I was a young teen (does that sound rather snobbish?) and there was that distinct possibility the books weren’t really as good as I remembered them being.  (I’m very happy to say that, 124 pages in, and with a strong reluctance to put it down even to write this post, it’s every bit as good as I remember.  Better, even, since I’m older and understand a good deal more about history and politics.)  But after I got to the library, I hesitated to check out Vienna Prelude for a much shallower (and possibly snobbier, though maybe not) reason.

The library has copies of books two through six in the Zion Covenant in the new editions published in 2005.  Vienna Prelude, however, is one of the original 1989 paperbacks.  And this copy has inspired me to use a word I haven’t used since probably 1989.

Grody.

I could exercise my authorly powers of description and paint word pictures of how the binding is broken (although that doesn’t bother me, as I always break the bindings of my books), how the cover is bent and curled and torn and the laminant is peeling, how there’s a faded sticker of some sort stuck to the front, peeling up and revealing some kind of gunk, how there are bits of tape with more gunk stuck haphazardly, how some of the words inside are obscured where pages have stuck together, and how every few pages I find some sort of stain whose origins I really don’t want to know, and how I hold the book gingerly in my fingertips as I read and have to think really hard about how much I enjoy the story and exercise sheer force of will not to gag at the thought of touching this grody book.  But they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so even though I used about a hundred words just now, I’ll give you three pictures instead of three thousand more words, because I don’t think mere words really can convey the grodiness of this book.

Seriously, I think if the rest of the series was in this condition, I wouldn’t have bothered to check the first one out.  As compelling as the story is, the larger part of my rapid-fire page turning is a desire to finish so I can return this book and get to the nicer, newer, un-grody editions.

I really do judge a book by its cover.

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anal retention, bodie thoene, books, grody things, historical fiction, passing judgment, silliness, the boy in the striped pyjamas, the holocaust, what i'm reading