All The Broken Places: The Sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

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All The Broken Places: The Sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

All The Broken Places: The Sequel to The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

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John Boyne holds up his phone proudly to show the display. It reads: “143 days since escaped hell.” Kertész bemoaned the way Holocaust art devolves into the dutiful repetition of “certain words”. What are they? Boyne suggests a few contenders. How many times does All the Broken Places refer to the “truth”? Forty-two. Guilt? Thirty-six. Past? Thirty-four. Trauma, horror, and monster get ten uses each. The dialogue is leaden and expository: “My daddy’s not a monster”; “It doesn’t matter any more. It’s all in the past.” The narration is bloated and risible: “He was gone. Louis was gone. Millions were gone”; “I had witnessed too much suffering in my life and done nothing to help. I had to intervene.”

And what is this novel? He sees it as a formulaic university novel of “self-involved students who think they are the first people in the world ever to have sex” and in which the authors, “terrified of offending anyone make sure they hit, in each book, all the right things: gay people, trans people, people of colour”. John Boyne himself says that “All the Broken Places” is a novel about guilt, complicity, and grief, a book that sets out to examine how culpable a young person might be, given the historical events unfolding around her, and whether such a person can ever cleanse themselves of the crimes committed by the people she loved....I have less interest in the monsters than I do in the people who knew what the monsters were doing and deliberately looked away.” John Boyne Absolutely not. Children’s and young adult publishing is in the worst place it has been in my lifetime,” he says. A scene from the 2008 film adaptation of John Boyne's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas: He has tied the narrative threads he left dangling in that book with his latest release, All the Broken Places, the story of Bruno’s older sister Gretel. Now a widow in her 90s, Gretel is living in London’s Mayfair, nursing a small fortune and the poisonous secret of her death camp father.In Gretel, Boyne has created a magnificently dyspeptic protagonist whose self-assurance, sharp tongue and wry humor are at odds with her private agony.” Gretel insists to Kurt that she doesn’t wish the Allies had lost the war, despite the personal advantages she would have gained. Kurt doesn’t believe her: “You’re lying. . . . You are. I can see it in your face. You need to tell yourself that you wouldn’t so you can feel a sense of moral superiority, but I don’t believe you for even a moment” (253). Do you believe Gretel? Later, when Alex Darcy-Witt suggests that Gretel wishes Germany had won the war, she responds, “No one wins a war” (355). Why do you think she answers differently this time? In this story, Gretel Fernsby is approaching her 92nd birthday when a new family moves into the flat below her. When she befriends the boy and the mother, she is faced with a complexity. She suspects that the husband is abusing, physically and emotionally, both the child and the wife. What to do? For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him. Of course, commercial publishing has always responded to reader trends, and these days can rush out similar novels as fast as high street fashion reproduces copycat catwalk looks. Boyne hopes today’s ambitious debut novels by young writers “can be retrieved once publishing becomes courageous once again”.

but to each their own. readers who can understand that this is a work of fiction with specific flaws should have no problem with it. and while i do think there might be some decent underlying intentions with this sequel and, from a narrative standpoint, i found the story engaging, i honestly wouldnt recommend it to someone looking for a novel about the holocaust or its effects after the war.

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I was born in Dublin, Ireland, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by UEA. Mr Richardson and I had enjoyed the perfect neighbourly relationship in that we had not exchanged a single word since 2008.” She loves her son, but she has all the advantages of a wonderful location plus only a few neighbours.

Boyne’s Gretel represents entire generations of Germans. Despite far-reaching efforts to come to terms with their terrible past in the post-war decades, Germans’ embrace of self-interested silence remains the rule rather than the exception.John Boyne will seat us right next to Gretel as she shuffles the scenery of her youth in Berlin during World War II. She's twelve years old and the family has moved to Auschwitz in Poland where her father is a commandant of one of the Reich's most notorious extermination camps. The family maintains their home right on the other side of the camp. Family life ignores the element of horror and tragedy only so many feet away. We first met Gretel when she was 12 years old in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, living "on the other side of the fence" at "Out-with" (Auschwitz). In All the Broken Places Boyne imagines the life she might have led after the war and how she would have dealt with her sense of guilt about what she witnessed of her beloved father’s role as the commandant of one of the Third Reich's most notorious death camps. More specifically, we learn about the contradictions in Gretel's mind about what she saw and what she did and didn't do. "I didn't know" . We follow her from girlhood to the age of 92, as she moves from Poland to post-war France, then 1950s Australia and finally Britain. Gretel is a wonderfully complex character, and John Boyne does an incredible job of challenging us to like or dislike Gretel. She is a woman who can show incredible generosity yet show dislikeable traits. Gretel rises to action driven by concern yet can deliver harsh reactions. The remarkable aspect of Gretel’s story is deciding how culpable she was at fifteen to the inhumane compassionless environment of Auschwitz and the gnawing guilt that has been her constant companion for eighty years. “If every man is guilty of all the good he did not do, as Voltaire suggested, then I have spent a lifetime convincing myself that I am innocent of all the bad.” If she was innocent, why was she living under an assumed name? Why had she kept her past hidden from everyone, including her son? We see Gretel hesitate at the line she drew in her youth, her determination to leave the past in the past, and her continued justification for making that decision. For how much is she responsible and for what should she feel guilty?



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