The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
by John Boyne
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Book Summary Information
Author: John BoyneEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2006-09-12
ISBN: 0385610556
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: David Fickling Books
Book Reviews of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Book Review: "In fact if anything it's going to be a great adventure"
Summary: 4 Stars
Nine-year-old Bruno doesn't know what to make of it when one afternoon he returns home from school and finds Maria, the maid stacking his belongings into a crate. Bruno is told by his Commandant father that the family will be relocating to "Out-With." Hugo is reluctant to leave Berlin behind; he loves this City and he's certainly going to miss his three best friends Karl, Daniel and Martin along with all the vibrant street life, the shops, and the fruit and vegetable stalls.
At Out-With everything around Bruno feels empty and cold as if he was in the loneliest place in the world. There's servants who are quite skinny and only ever speak to one another in whispering voices. There is also something about the new house that makes Bruno think that no one ever laughed here, that there was absolutely nothing to laugh at and nothing to be happy about and everyone always seems so angry.
One night when the "Fury" comes to dinner, a most important man, Bruno begins realize just how prestigious his father's job is. An explorer at heart and a lover of adventure novels, Bruno becomes obessessed with the forest beyond the driveway of the house. Most mysterious, however, is what lies beyond the high barbed wire fence and the wooden telegraph poles and the barbed-wire bales, where Bruno can see the hard ground where there's huts and smoke stacks and soldiers standing around in groups, laughing and joking.
From his bedroom window Hugo can see hundreds of thin and greyish people - small boys and big boys with their fathers, uncles and even grandfathers - all wearing the same clothes as each other, a pair of grey striped pajamas with a grey striped cap on their heads. He knows there's a life beyond wire bales and the wooden telegaph poles, perhaps even other boys he can play with.
First, however, he has to fend off the attentions of the nasty Lieutenant Kotler who hounds him and picks on him. There's also Gretel his truculent sister, whom he calls the "Hopeless Case" and who constantly has difficulty explaining to him who all those strange people actually are. One afteroon Bruno goes on a long walk and eventually meets a boy sitting on the other side of the fence who is the same age as him.
The boy's name is Shmuel and Hugo becomes convinced Shmuel is a boy with whom he can play with. Shmuel tells him about his mother and father and how they lived in a small flat above the store where his Papa made watches. One day they were made to wear armbands from a special cloth with a star drawn on each one and then soldiers came to take them away and bought them to this strange place.
Although Hugo still misses his friends in Berlin things had changed for him over time, mostly due to Shmuel who steadily becomes more important to him than Karl, Daniel and Martin have ever been. Hugo is blithely innocent of what is going on around him, he just wants to hop over the fence and go exploring with Shmuel, perhaps even help him find his father who a few days ago suddenly went missing and has not returned.
This darkly cautionary tale is a devastatingly bleak look at innocence lost. Whilst Hugo's imagination works overtime, his bland, dutiful Commandant father works the camp, supervising the orderly exterminations. Although there is a hole in the fence that a nine-year-old boy can slip through, Shmuel never tries to run away, so thoroughly is he ingrained and fearful of the nightmare-taking place around him. It is left up to Hugo to take the ultimate risk with terrible consequences for them both.
Author John Boyne's point of view is so much more powerful when told through the perspective of a nine-year-old boy. Hugo and Shmuel's virtuousness and purity provides a stark contrast to the death and murder that exists around them day after day. The prose is simplistic but always compelling as the author achieves a delicate balance of presenting this almost unbelievable ordinariness of evil, the mechanical Nazi death machine as it goes about its business of annihilation and extinction. Mike Leonard September 06.
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