via onlyinbooks (tumblr)
Alright, I never finished Life of Pi and really have no intention of reading Beatrice and Virgil, but I love Yann Martel. And I adore this interview recently published in the Guardian, in which he defends his (and everyone else’s) right to write about the Holocaust.
“The tragedy of the Holocaust wasn’t exclusively Jewish,” he says. “It was non-Jews who did it. It was an act of two groups, so it’s not just for Jews to be expert on the Holocaust. In any case, we’re in dialogue with history, and you no more own a historical event than people own their language. The English don’t own the English language; the Jews don’t own the Holocaust; the French don’t own Verdun. It’s good to have other perspectives. If you claim to own an event, you may suffer from group think.”
Along the similar lines, Meg Rosoff ponders using real-life characters in fiction, in this case using Sharon Dogar’s Annexed as an example. A few weeks ago we discussed this a bit in terms of historical fiction but Rosoff pulls in some modern examples as well (including personal favourites The Uncommon Reader and The Queen and I, both of which feature Queen Elizabeth II as the protagonist).
As there is nothing I like better than curling up with a big book of other people’s personal correspondence, I had to include the dying art of letter writing. I choose to take these articles (and they are legion) as arguments for why email should be avoided whenever possible in favour of handwritten, posted correspondence. This backfires on me. A lot. People love to receive mail but then never send a response and, I suspect, my bons mots end up in their recycling bins more often than not (save for my more supportive friends who live in hope/fear that I will one day be famous for something, their foresight in having lugged around my letter these many years to be rewarded by my eager biographers. Good luck to them but prospects seem dim).
Finally, what would a Friday Potpourri be without an NPR link? And this one’s great: Three Degrees of Failure for the Recent Graduate. It includes Vanity Fair, which I can never read too many times, and The Group, which depressed me beyond belief when I first read it as a teenager.
The Captive Reader 
Interesting thoughts (yours and Meg Rosoff’s). I loved The Uncommon Reader!
The Uncommon Reader is delightful. It’s one of those books I want to press on every person I know.
I agree with Meg Rosoff’s thoughts on writing about historical characters much more than the other article we discussed recently. It reminds me that I should really read more of her works. (Not that that has anything to do with the article).
I’m not a huge fan of Rosoff, but I did like her article. Let people write about whatever they want. Fiction, as she says, “is a free-for-all.”
I read this article yesterday. Not knowing much about Yann Martel, my opinion of him increased mightily after reading it!
It reminded me of a conversation I had with a Jewish woman about my in-laws being in a German labour camp (they were Ukrainian) during WWII. She looked at me and said ‘Yes, but they weren’t Jews’. I thought it was sad the way she was putting Jewish suffering over anyone else’s. The stories I heard from my in-laws were extremely horrifying and I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for anyone during that time.
The idea of viewing only one group as the victims of WWII drives me absolutely batty, even moreso after having done my minor in German history at University. My grandmother’s best friend was Jewish and died in a concentration camp, but then so did many of her other, non-Jewish friends, all young intellectuals. Concentration camps weren’t just for Jews and, as you say, forced-labour camps were horrifying (on both sides – the USSR had the Gulag several years before the first German camp was built, and who can forget that the British originated concentration camps in South Africa?).
We read a lot about heroic little Britain, standing strong through the Blitz, but there’s very little (translated?) literature covering the experiences of average citizens within the Reich and the occupied countries, people who lived under far worse circumstances for far longer. That’s part of the reason why A Woman in Berlin is one of my favourite books, because it humanizes the German experience, painting such a vivid picture of the last days of the war and the atrocities committed by the Allied forces. Over the past few years, I’ve become more and more interested in the mass eviction of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after the war – affecting 12 to 14 million people (somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million of them died during this process), the largest mass relocation of a single ethnic group in history.
I have a hard time believing that anyone came out of that war with the moral high ground, or the right to view themselves as supreme victim over the others who suffered.
What a lovely photograph! I love Yann Martel, but out of a myriad of reviews, I’ve only read one good one about Beatrice and Virgil. That hasn’t stopped me from wanting to read it though.
Isn’t the photo wonderful? The perfect mix of beauty and fantasy. I hope you do enjoy Beatrice and Virgil when you read it!
I’m always sad that people don’t write letters. But I’m as culpable as anyone else – I write letters occasionally, but mostly it’s emails or talking on the phone. The most regular letter-writing I do is thank-you notes, which I write to everyone for everything. :p