What I said then:
The classic Holocaust memoir. (side note --- wow, detailed!)
What I say now:
Given the ridiculous restrictions I'm placing on myself, it's going to be pretty rare that I can follow a thread with my reading, letting one book lead me to the next. Usually I'll just be jumping all over the place. So I figured I'd take the chance to do a bit of 'themed' reading while it presented itself, and given how much I loved The Plot Against America I thought it'd be interesting to contrast it with this.
Presumably everybody knows this book. It's one of the most well-known, beloved books of the twentieth century (along with, I dunno, Lord of the Rings and To Kill a Mockingbird and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and American Psycho ... oh, just me?). Anne Frank got given a diary on her thirteenth birthday, the twelfth of June, 1942, in Amsterdam. Twenty-four days later her family went into hiding in a 'secret annexe,' a suite of rooms hidden at the top of a warehouse. They were joined by another family and a mutual acquaintance, making eight people in all. With the help of about five or six Dutch men and women, they stayed there for more than two years, before being discovered, arrested, sent to concentration camps and, with the exception of Anne's father, killed in the very last months of the war. One of their helpers saved Anne's diary, which she'd been writing in all that time, and it was later published by her father.
As a document of one small drama within the greater unfolding drama of the war, the book is remarkable. In hiding, they listen to Churchill's speeches on the radio and discuss the pending invasion. They have scares when burglars break into the warehouse below them. They worry that the man who delivers potatoes knows they're there, then find out that he himself has been hiding Jews ... and that he's just been arrested. The small heroisms of those in hiding and their helpers deserve recognition, and this diary gives it to them.
Because of the book's exalted place in our culture, I'd sort of expected Anne herself to be an angelic figure, a perfect girl. In fact, she was nothing of the sort: reading between the lines, she comes off as an ordinary, wilful teen who was occasionally obnoxious and annoying and, being the youngest person in the annexe, got on everybody's nerves. What makes the book really special is the way Anne grows in the two years in hiding, the way she begins to know and understand herself. The diary drastically shifts in tone, in keeping with Anne's changing moods, and the blunt reality of that reminds you that, hey, this was a real girl, and if she was angry when she sat down to write, she wrote angry. If she was dreamy, she wrote dreamy. If she was scared, she wrote scared.
It seems ridiculous to 'review' this book at all, really. It's great, its reputation is justified, and if you can get through the third-last diary entry --- which reads, in part: "It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It's utterly impossible for me build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." --- if you can get through that without needing to pull out a hanky or a tissue or pretending you've just been chopping onions, then you're more hard-hearted than I.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
books to go: 122
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