books, renovations and life

[novin_ha]

Renovations still underway at home - we now own two more large wardrobes with mirror doors (♥) and some additional bookshelves, which I am already planning to appropriate. Floor in the hall has been re-done, and I have personally torn down one hell of a lot of wallpaper. I'm growing rather resentful towards wallpaper, to be honest. It seems to have

Comments

[etrangere]

I remember a couple of years ago, I was discussing the Shoah with a Jew of Polish origin who was guiding tour to former concentration camps etc., and because of Maus I think I had been left with a prejudice about how Polish were treated and how they fought the Nazis and that guy set me entirely straight on it.

So much as I lvoed Maus as a book, it certainly conveyed something wrong to me.

[novin_ha]

And it's a pity, isn't it? Because if I only read this, I really would have assumed occupation was a pickle for most Poles, and that's a lie; my own family members died in Stutthoff, while others had to hide in the forest for months not to be sent to Wehrmacht. My grandmother has nightmares about the war till this day.

My grandfather went to school with a daughter of a Jewish woman who became pregnant with a death camp officer, who at least had the decency to get her out once she became pregnant. This story is the one I always found most terrifying. How do you live knowing this is how you were conceived? And let's not pretend environment would have been very sympathetic for a child with such heritage...

[etrangere]

*nods* I am definitely glad I learned that it was otherwise. It's not all to blame on Maus... I mean, if the the classes I've had on WW2 at school at addressed the subject, I wouldn't have had that misconception either.

I'm sorry about your family.

I can't imagine what I would be like either, to be a child conceived like that.

[silburygirl]

Interesting thoughts on Maus-I actually noticed the same thing, but thought it was an intentional effect, because Spiegelman is retelling his father's story as his father remembers it, so it reflects more on the father's point of view than historical fact...

However, I was also writing a paper on it and had to dig. A lot.

Am dying to read Notes on a Scandal, so I'm happy to hear good things about it.

[novin_ha]

I am very much willing to believe that it's intentional - but I would really have liked for that aspect of the narrator's unreliability to be pointed out to the reader - I think the medium and the weight of the omission demands it.

I do like it quite a lot though.

I hope you'll enjoy it. I don't think it was that great a novel, but a really enjoyable read indeed. Delicious, so to speak.

[czarna_pantera]

Wszelkich remontów współczuję, bo sama przeszłam ostatnio trzy, jeden gorszy od drugiego. Masz moje mentalne wsparcie.