The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah
This was one of the titles from the Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen that I was most excited to read, an anticipation that was somewhat disappointed as this one made no huge impression on me. I liked it, I was happy to have read it once I had finished. Contrary to what most reader reviews suggest–I am thinking mostly of goodreads, where most readers note dutifully the importance of being educated on a forgotten corner of World War 2 history–this is not a Holocaust novel; this is a novel about grief; about a small boy who has lost all of his brothers and who, through a series of tragedies, loses the stand-in brother, a friend who happens to be a Jewish refugee imprisoned in bureaucratic stasis on the island of Mauritius. It is indeed set in a forgotten pocket of the Holocaust narrative, but Appanah, I believe, makes a very conscious decision throughout most of the book to distance it from the genre. (I say most because the ending, the last few pages, disrupt this impression by making the historical context quite explicit. I hated the ending.) And thank goodness that she does. Holocaust in literature is a quandary best avoided except by minds of the highest order, writers of the finest talent and most unimpeachable integrity.* Appanah sidesteps the problem by employing the well-used trope of “adult narrator looking back on and retelling childhood events,” a narrative frame that is common enough to raise skepticism in this reader, but which may well have saved the book for me. It provided the very necessary perspective of memory and adulthood that saved it from falling into that most sentimentally precarious of genres, that of the Holocaust novel: through the aged eyes of adult Raj, his childhood friend David is an enigma, a total Other; language barriers and the oblivion of childhood prevented young Raj from ever seeing his friend or knowing his suffering–and grown Raj realizes this and is repeatedly, physically tormented by his failure to ever know this most precious of friends, this surrogate brother. I took Raj’s retrospective realization as to how little he understood David’s situation as signifying the ineffable horror of the Holocaust, how it is impossible for anyone who has not directly experienced it to come close to understanding what it is like; that Appanah wove the acknowledgement of this impossibility into the plot is a mark in its favor. This strategy–an old man wracked by guilt over his failure to understand, and by understanding save, a young Jewish refugee–could have been heavy-handed, but it worked for me.
Rather, it worked until the ending, which–spoiler, I suppose–nearly destroyed the book for me: the last few pages have a stilted summary of historical events, unnecessarily shoehorned in, followed by a pat avowal to remember and pass on the story to future generations. This jerked the whole text back into the territory of bad Holocaust novels and the cliches they trade in. I would have preferred an ending more in line with the fraught guilt and sense of lifelong grief that characterizes the rest of the novel–the one it has quite undermines any emotional force that the book had until its close. So long as I can willfully pretend not to have read the last few pages I can appreciate this book.
*I draw a line of distinction between Holocaust fiction and true accounts, of course–everyone should read Primo Levi and Eli Wiesel–but my unease about fiction in this subgenre is due in part to the proliferation of false accounts which do great harm to historical truth, obviously by giving ammunition to deniers, but also simply by blurring the lines between fiction and reality in every mind. I cannot go so far as to agree with Adorno’s famous moratorium against creating art after the Holocaust; I am too much a romantic believer in the necessity of literature to go that far. But it is a difficult area, and books like The Book Thief or The Boy in the Striped Pajamas offend me, and are primarily what I am thinking of when I say how glad I am that The Last Brother is not of their ilk. I won’t continue in this digression–it’s awfully complicated to express well–but I refer anyone interested to the always-eloquent Cynthia Ozick: her essays “Who Owns Anne Frank?” and “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination,” both found in the collection Quarrel & Quandary, have informed my thoughts on this matter; I don’t fully agree with her–she takes an extreme stance–but the bones of the argument have always struck me as sound and I look upon the subgenre with eyes tinted by suspicion.
You have made excellent points. I am afraid, in re-reading my own comments, that I am one of those who praised the “awareness raising” aspect of the book. The fact of a wandering boat full of Jews trying to escape the Europe is an important event. However, you are right to be suspect whenever the Holocaust is used, or appears to be used, to add weight to a novel. I think you are right if you are suggesting that the connections to the Holocaust could have been excised from the novel without, in fact, making it a worse novel.
The novel is best when focused on Raj as a child and the helplessness of Raj the adult to guide the child down a better path. The brutal fact of the Holocaust and its consequences is not necessary to that story and, therefore, perhaps ought not be fictionalized. I would have a difficult time arguing against that position, and I wouldn’t care to.
I do agree with you that the ending was the weakest part of the novel. I like your suggestions for improvement. The novel could have been better without “the stilted summary of historical events, unnecessarily shoehorned in”. She says her discovery of those events led her to write the novel in the first place, so, in that sense, their presence is inevitable.
Great, thought-provoking review.
Kerry, thank you for the comment! You’re quite right, it is important for us all to have gained awareness of this event. I cannot and should not have implied anything against the value of awareness: greater knowledge is always a good thing, no matter how it is transmitted.
It’s just–it does bother me, this message of the book, when it is paired with that ending. It feels like an implied exhortation upon the reader when Raj promises himself to transmit David’s story to his son so he will remember–with that as the last thought of the book, the onus is handed on to the reader to remember the story. And most of us are happy to: after a fairly troubling and stressful (speaking strictly for myself–the scenes of trauma where the language just goes to pieces in those hurtful run-on sentences were upsetting for me to read) reading experience we are happy, unconsciously or not, to be given a task that we can easily carry out, one that makes the ending not-unhappy and changes the tone of the entire reading experience.
The problem is not just that this is sentimental and cliched (though it is). What I find troubling is that while Appanah may have set out to educate about this forgotten piece of history, she ends by asking us to remember a piece of fiction, a wholly untrue tale about a Jewish boy named David, and so for many the historical events are clouded by the fictional emblem, that charming little boy, who does not actually exist but whose face and antics nonetheless might come to represent the event in some minds. I find this utterly disturbing–I might agree with Ozick more than I will usually admit in rational conversation.
I’m imagining a version of this novel without the Holocaust element now, or at least one where it is minimized. Perhaps it would work better mostly the same but with a different ending and either a forward or a detailed afterward telling the historical events that inspired the tale? That would have left me with a cleaner note in my head.
Again, I agree very much with your position. I probably paid too little attention to the “remember this” part of it when, as you say, the most memorable parts of this are David and Raj (fictional characters) rather than anything or anyone necessarily Holocaust-related. That is a problem. (Nothing huge, I certainly think she wrote a good book and means entirely well, but you are right that exhortations to remember a fictional story seem misplaced.)
I really thank you for pointing me to the Ozick piece, which I had not read before, and I do think she had good points. I think touching on any large-scale tragedy like that is a minefield. Fiction set against the backdrop almost necessarily feels like it is trading on tragedy to garner interest. That is not the case with this book, and, yet, it is hard for any fictional account to avoid some amount of that, some bit of commercialization of a truly horrific world event. No line is perfect and part of art’s job is to examine such events, but I like you fixes to the book. Minimizing the Holocaust element and/or including a detailed factual account of historical events in Maurtius that inspired the story of two boys would, I think, have been an improvement.
Anyway, thanks, again, for a post and commentary that made me engage with the book and larger literary questions in ways I had not yet done. This is part of what I love about the Tournament of Books, it creates a conversation. Thank you!
[...] Moving Under Skies: “This was one of the titles from the Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen that I was most excited to read, an anticipation that was somewhat disappointed as this one made no huge impression on me. I liked it, I was happy to have read it once I had finished…..[I]t worked until the ending, which–spoiler, I suppose–nearly destroyed the book for me.” [...]
Thanks for linking up to this from today’s TOB page. I teach middle school English and *love* the Ozick piece, which I use to inform my teaching of Anne Frank. Interestingly, having read *many* a Holocaust novel meant for the YA audience, I find The Book Thief to be okay, while I found Striped Pajamas to be disgusting. More and more, I find myself only able to read non-fiction about the Holocaust. I’d be interested to hear what novels you feel make the cut you describe above….
Thank you for the comment. I really enjoyed our discussion on The Last Brother over at the ToB and was sorry I didn’t get to return to it earlier. Work, dinner obligations! I really like your reading of it, the one that gives perhaps too much credit to Appanah–I wish that I could believe that the ideas of grief and appropriation as you articulated them so excellently were intentional; rather, I suspect she had a somewhat hazy glimmer of them and failed to impart them fully into the book. I wish it had been a more conscious exploration of guilt and grief than it was: had it been, I probably would have a higher opinion of it. Alas, “okay book with a super yucky ending” seems to be my final consensus. It probably should have won today regardless, though; 1Q84 hasn’t come anywhere close to generating as much thought and discussion for me and I always respect a book that has that result.
How great that you use the Ozick piece in class! It must lead to some good discussion. I studied it once in a course on Jewish literature and it was a rousing discussion. Have you read Francine Prose’s book on Anne Frank? Between Prose and Ozick I have been utterly convinced that she would have been a literary giant; I mourn a little whenever I shelve or sell copies of the diary at work.
I’m very glad we agree about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Just awful. It’s definitely worse than The Book Thief, though the problems that I have with that book are serious indeed. It’s just so … rosy. And morally one-dimensional. I get that it’s a YA book* and gets a maybe-pass on those things but the Magical Jew in the basement and the fact that it’s narrated by Death, who for some reason spends so much time and loving energy describing Leisel’s life and the tragic death of her wee aryan brother on a train while just sort of shrugging off the Holocaust?? This seems so wrong to me that I put the book down the first time I tried to read it–I only finished it later out of hope that it was not actually as bad as I remembered it to be. Catherynne Valente, a sf author I admire, has a post about this on her blog. It’s very CAPSLOCKED and enraged but I generally agree with her arguments (just wish they were in the form a devastating formal essay rather than a journal entry–I’d write on these problems myself but I’d have to reread the book in order to do so). It’s the opposite problem of the Holocaust as being used for manipulative pathos; its perspective is so inherently and blatantly skewed that it left me with a very unpleasant feeling.
(*I’m never entirely clear as to whether or not The Book Thief actually is YA. I think it may have been written and published for adults in Australia and rebranded as YA in America. I overwhelmingly sell copies to adults–in fact cannot remember the last teenager I sold one to–and I have substantial numbers to support this tendency that exists at least in my town–it was one of our surprise bestsellers over the fall and early winter.)
Holocaust novels that make the cut. That is a difficult one. I haven’t read much in the genre for some time after years of disappointment–these days I, too, prefer nonfiction for that area of study. I really admired William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central when I read it some years ago; it’s as much about Leningrad as anything (and it’s a fairly good consideration of it, though Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, about Stalingrad largely, is the best I’ve read on the Russian side of things–a brilliant book) but it does have a thread about Kurt Gerstein. I need to reread it. Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada is a very good–much better than The Book Thief–novel about everyday German life during the Nazi regime… but not really, directly, a Holocaust novel. Other than that only the predictable names come to mind as passes: Wiesel, Levi, Kertesz, Borowski: people who experienced it. Do you have any suggestions? I have copies of Sebold’s Austerlitz and Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise but haven’t gotten around to them yet–one or the other will probably be the next WW2 novel that I read.