100 Books in 2011 Challenge: The Auschwitz Violin

This one raises an interesting question: is it ok to not like a book on this subject? The Auschwitz Violin by Maria Àngels Anglada, trans. Martha Tennent, is the story of a violin maker interned in Auschwitz who is ordered to make a violin for the camp Commander. He does this amid the starvation and terror of life in the concentration camps.

This is a novella, or at around 25,000 words, a long short story. Looking at it as a short story makes the structure make a bit more sense. What I missed in this book was depth. Life in the concentration camps was horrific and I've read a few thing dealing with that subject. Yet it doesn't come across here. I get the sense that the horror is being skated over. Maybe that's a matter of taste - I do, after all, like visceral writing. Or maybe it's an issue of courage. Perhaps the author didn't want to commit to describing the conditions in Auschwitz in gory detail. I can see how that can seem gratuitous. Unfortunately, for me, that made it hard to connect to the fortitude of the protagonist. It didn't seem like that much of an heroic struggle because the impact of the environment wasn't fully brought out.

The writing itself is good and the story has great potential. I just found myself questioning the choices of the author about the structure of the story and what she chose to show. All the way through, I was thinking that I might have done it differently.

So, this book didn't really do it for me. I felt distanced from the story by the technique. I'd read this story if it was re-written by someone else. And yet I feel a bit uncomfortable saying that I didn't like the book because of the subject matter. If you like literary fiction, and don't like horror, then this may be for you. It was a bit too sanitised for my taste.