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

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This book is a companion to the “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”. The books share characters and events, but this can be read as a standalone. In this book, we encounter Gretel in four places, in each of which a dramatic, gut wrenching event occurs - Germany/Poland during the war, France where Gretel and her mother tried to make new lives, Australia where Gretel’s attempt to run from her history failed again and London where she found love. I don’t doubt there is a valuable novel to be written about Nazi children, but Boyne does not choose this path. He lingers for a while, but then transforms his novel, instead, into what feels like a police procedural: a thriller. From the author of the multi-million-copy classic, and The Heart's Invisible Furies. A devastating, beautiful story about a woman who must confront the sins of her past and a present in which it is never too late for bravery.

But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it – though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. Boyne does a deep dive into this deeply flawed character. How one can never escape the past; How events shape who we are; How we remain broken until we can reconcile the past with the present; how we can still change who we are from who we were. Even decades later. This is the valuable part of the novel: in Paris, in hiding, Gretel and her mother, an unrepentant Nazi, are shaved at a kangaroo court; she is attracted to violent sex with men who hate her because she is German; in Australia, she meets the psychopath she loved as a child, her father’s assistant, and they discuss their complicity; she becomes pregnant by a Jewish man.A powerful novel about secrets and atonement after Auschwitz… All the Broken Places is a defence of literature's need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature; and it does so with a novelist's skill, precision and power." - The Guardian (UK)

I have had quite a degree of difficulty trying to rate and review this book. I notice that many people are rating it five stars but I cannot do that because it would put it on the same standing as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and to me at least it is certainly not that good. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. A powerful novel about secrets and atonement after Auschwitz… All the Broken Places is a defence of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature; and it does so with a novelist’s skill, precision and power.” 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.' The Boy with the Striped PyjamasIn his 1998 essay “Who Owns Auschwitz?” the survivor and Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész grappled with the problem of how to represent the Holocaust in literature and film. The paradox he expressed was that “for the Holocaust to become with time a real part of European (or at least western European) public consciousness, the price inevitably extracted in exchange for public notoriety had to be paid”. That price was the Shoah’s “stylisation”: its transformation into either “cheap consumer goods” or “a moral-political ritual, complete with a new and often phony language”. In both cases, he argued, the Holocaust gradually becomes the realm not of reality, not of history, not of jaw-dropping, thought-defying tragedy, but of kitsch. Kurt asks Gretel, “Why do you struggle to call things what they are?” (251) She refuses to say her brother’s name or the name of her former residence in Germany. How do you think this affects the way Gretel processes her emotions? Can you relate?

Among my most popular books are The Heart’s Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky and My Brother’s Name is Jessica. In All the Broken Places we meet Gretel again. The book is told in two timelines, one after Gretel and her mother have escaped after the war and gone undercover so as avoid possible arrest for war crimes, and the other of Gretel in her nineties living in comfort in London but still hiding under another name and still full of guilt. That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of Striped Pyjamas, which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the nine-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pyjamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. When is a monster's child culpable? Guilt and complicity are multifaceted. John Boyne is a maestro of historical fiction. You can't prepare yourself for the magnitude and emotional impact of this powerful novel." - John Irving, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The World According to GarpThis is not literature. As a grown-up sequel to children’s trash, All the Broken Places serves two roles. First, to demonstrate that Boyne definitely did not think that the Germans were innocent, definitely knew they were “complicit” and “guilty” and that history is “complicated”, etc, thanks very much. Second, to serve as a sort of fan fiction for those peculiar adults who long for the comfort of a childhood favourite. At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.” change their last name and identity. But the French bear the scars of this war and they are an observant lot. In time, Gretel and her mother must flee once again. Australia......

Will her secret stay a secret, or will she chose to help a little boy is the issue she faces with the knowledge it could blow her world apart?

The Devil’s Daughter

All the Broken Places is a sequel to Boyne's 2006 book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and follows the now 91-year-old older sister of Bruno from that book, Gretel. Gretel has lived in London for decades, never speaking of her childhood in Nazi Germany as the daughter of a concentration camp commandant. Her life is upended when a new family moves in next door whose circumstances force her to confront her own past. [1] Plot [ edit ] 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.