The boy in the striped pajamas

Author's Name: John Boyne

Translated by: Ranim Al-Amri

How do you talk about Nazism, the Holocaust, and concentration camps without mentioning them verbally?

John Boyne's starting point may have been to protect the reader - who he assumed was a child - from what was shocking and brutal, but the truth is that the style he adopted reflects a creative mind, and that the novel he intended for young readers is no longer restricted to them.

I have always believed that writing about big issues, about headlines written in bold on the brow of history, should be broken down into details within the literary work, almost to the point of disappearing, and that is what I found here. John Boyne was adept at representing the psychology of the child: the whims, the curiosity, and his vain attempts to understand the adult world, a world he did not create but of which he must be one of the victims.

The work is so engaging that you finish it in a night or two, it is well compressed, and it is a successful model for those who want to write a dramatic work without vulgar drama, to write about violence without shedding a single drop of blood, to write about history without getting bogged down in history.

Thank you, Ranim Al-Amri, for the beautiful translation.