[I can’t lie, I haven’t had time to read for pleasure during this academic year, so I don’t have a ton of new recs for this year’s Beach Reads series. So I wanted to revisit authors and books I’ve read on the beach over my life—and to ask for your own recommendations for a crowd-sourced weekend post we can all throw in the beach bag!]
Why you
should read two Holocaust novels on the beach this summer.
When faced
with the worst of what humanity can do and be, sometimes all we can do is
laugh. That idea is at the heart of a particular post-war strain of American
literature and art, the satirical
black comedy of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22,
Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (and later Full Metal Jacket), and other similar
works. Yet while some of these works (especially Vonnegut’s novel) do feature
relatively sympathetic characters, I would argue that our laughter is not with
these characters so much as at them, or at least at the ironic and ridiculous
situations in which we encounter them. Such laughter might well help us deal
with the horrors behind those situations, or render the memories of them
powerless to inflict further pain; but it also has the potential to distance us
from the horrors, to make histories that were dead serious to those who
experienced them instead seem somewhat silly to us.
That’s one
kind of laughter in response to the worst in humanity, and whatever its
strengths and weaknesses, I don’t think it makes for entertaining beach reading
(although to each his or her own!). But there’s another, very different kind of
laughter, one in which the funny voices and perspectives of sympathetic
characters lead us as an audience to laugh even as those characters deal with
such historical horrors. I think that was the intent behind Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust-centered film
Life is Beautiful (which I haven’t seen, so I can’t personally speak
to the results!). And that kind of laughter also comprises a big part of two
recent, popular and award-winning American Holocaust novels (written by a pair
of married New Yorkers): Jonathan
Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002) and
Nicole
Krauss’s The History of Love (2005).
Both
Foer’s and Krauss’s novels are in many ways mysteries, puzzles in which the
final pieces don’t lock together until their conclusions, and I’m certainly not
going to spoil either here (what kind of beach read commendation would that
be?). But I will say that one of the chief pleasures of both novels is in the
very funny narrative voices of two of their protagonists: Foer’s Alex, a
supremely self-confident yet secretly sensitive Ukrainian kid whose efforts at
translating and writing in English aren’t exactly prize-winning; and Krauss’s
Leo, a self-deprecating and gloomy elderly Jewish American man whose
experiences posing nude for an art class form a throughline for much of the
novel’s opening section. It’s no spoiler to say that the novels go many other
places as well—they are, after all, Holocaust novels—but as readers we are
guided to and through those places by Alex and Leo’s voices, and the genuine,
sympathetic, and hearty laughs that each provides. Not a bad reaction to get
from a beach read!
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more time:
you know what to do—share Beach Read recs for the weekend post, please!
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