Demob Happy

John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
I’m naturally suspicious of the recent glut of novels marketed as children’s literature for adults (see ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ and ‘The Life of Pi’), but this is a darker proposition. The Holocaust makes for a particularly poignant subject for John Boyne’s [...]

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Dignity and denial - the noble art of butlering
In a comment on my post reviewing ‘When we Were Orphans‘, John Self of Asylum pointed out that many of Ishiguro’s novels are about ‘blindness’. While that novel has not warmed on me, it was with ‘blindness’ in mind that I read ‘Remains of the Day’, also [...]

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Reading of responsibility
9/10
The Reader is a subtle, thought-provoking work that continues - but does not quite belong to - a tradition of Holocaust literature. The novel very cleverly raises questions about the nature of complicity and the boundaries of responsibility. It also examines the idea of collective ‘amnesia’ and its consquential twin, collective guilt. It [...]

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