Yann Martel waking up to his quote as a headline all over the UK: “Jews don’t own the Holocaust”

11 comments on “Yann Martel waking up to his quote as a headline all over the UK: “Jews don’t own the Holocaust””

1. K says:
   June 23rd, 2010 at 4:14 pm

   Rough pull quote.

2. Melissa says:
   June 24th, 2010 at 9:10 am

   If I wasn’t on his side at the beginning of the year, I am now. Could he be raked over the coals any further?

3. Robert J. Wiersema says:
   June 24th, 2010 at 10:57 am

   From the article: ” the general problem Martel faced with this book – that many critics recoil from the very idea of a Holocaust novel written by an author who is neither Jewish nor basing his work, as with Schindler’s Ark, on some sanctified piece of history.”

   As someone who “raked [Martel] over the coals” (sheesh), I’d like to see these MANY reviews, evidence of this “general problem”. Because, frankly, I think this is a horseshit rationalization, and a way of inuring the book against criticism.

4. Steven Galloway says:
   June 24th, 2010 at 1:38 pm

   [ed note: rescued from spam filter where all posts with links in the body go -- approved by executive decision]

   Robert: Start with the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/books/13book.html
   Michiko Kakutani’s review is pretty much the embodiment of this position.
   The sentiment is echoed here:
   http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/05/beatrice-and-virgil-yann-martel
   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/13/AR2010041303903_pf.html
   http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1982325,00.html
   http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_reviews/article7131494.ece
   http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/6069538/stuff-and-nonsense.thtml
   http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/30/yann-martell-beatrice-and-virgil
   http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/brieflynoted/2010/05/17/100517crbn_brieflynoted3

   For what it’s worth, I think it’s fair to say that your review would not be included in this category. Your opinion is as valid as any. I thought it was a really good book. But it’s simply incorrect for you to suggest that a component of many of the negative reviews involves perceived boundaries in writing on subjects such as the holocaust.
   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/beatrice-and-virgil-by-yann-martel-1984399.html

5. Roland says:
   June 24th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

   If the quote had been “Jews own the holocaust,” it would have been just as much a conversation-starter. Nobody likes an emphatic statement.

6. B. Glen Rotchin says:
   June 25th, 2010 at 8:12 am

   How and if the Holocaust should be handled in fiction is the crux of the novel. Therefore questions about who ‘owns’ or rather has the ‘license’ (as John Updike put it in his New Yorker review of Martim Amis’s Times Arrow) to make art of the event are valid. Martel himself admits that this is the crux of his novel. Therefore, his book should be judged on how successfully he answer the question, and the general consensus of the reviews is, not very well. I believe he handles a ‘red-hot’ subject sensitively, even as the novel fails as a novel. I have this sense that it was not Martel’s goal, as he has said in interview after interview, to preserve the legacy and lessons of the Holocaust for future generations through new forms of storytelling. Rather, I believe it was to rescue the literary arts (fiction, allegory, theatre, drama, etc.) as relevant forms of storytelling in the multimedia digital age by taking on the ultimate ‘untouchable’ subject. It’s a laudable gesture, if somewhat misguided. Reviewers arguing that the Holocaust should never be touched in fiction, or that Martel does not have the ‘right’ to deal with it because he isn’t Jewish only serves to show how far his novel backfires.

7. B. Glen Rotchin says:
   June 25th, 2010 at 9:55 am

   Oh yeah, and happy birthday Yann!

8. Robert J. Wiersema says:
   June 25th, 2010 at 10:18 am

   Steven — I appreciate the time you took with those links. I had seen most of them previously.
   Seeing as you suggested I start with Kakutani’s review from the NYT, I did.

   Now, maybe I’m an idiot, or maybe I’m just reading-impaired (I’ve been accused of both), but can you please point out to me where, precisely, Kakutani’s review “recoil[s] from the very idea of a Holocaust novel written by an author who is [not] Jewish”, or objects to Martel not “basing his work…on some sanctified piece of history”?

   Seriously, I’m not seeing it, so if you could point either of these things out in the review — “pretty much the embodiment of this position” — I’d appreciate it.

   (The closest I see, for the record, is the line which begins “his story has the effect of trivializing the Holocaust,”, but that’s clearly and specifically referring to his “using it as a metaphor to evoke “the extermination of animal life” and the suffering of “doomed creatures” who “could not speak for themselves.””, so I don’t think that fits…)

   I’m going to go through the rest of the articles one by one (not here, you’ll be pleased to know), because I am genuinely curious about where this “general problem” in the criticism of this book comes from. Your help is appreciated.

9. Steven Galloway says:
   June 25th, 2010 at 11:21 am

   Rob,
   I think you’re safely neither reading impaired nor an idiot.
   Obviously this position isn’t explicitly stated, but in my reading of Kakutani’s review, and the other ones to a lesser but present degree, the subtext is that Martel shouldn’t have written a book about the holocaust, and that he shouldn’t have done it the way he did. When she says that his use of animals as metaphor for the Jews “trivializes” the holocaust, and calls the work “offensive” she’s saying it loud and clear. Because even if you think Beatrice and Virgil is a bad book, on an artistic level, I think it’s pretty much impossible to argue that it fits into the category of offensive. A fair number of reviews have suggested that they simply don’t think the book did what it set out to do (Aravind Adiga’s review is a good example of this, I think, though I can’t remember offhand where it appeared) and that’s fair. But the way I read the Kakutani review, and the others I posted, is that this book isn’t being reviewed entirely on its merits as a book. It’s also being held to another standard that has to do with notions of ownership and sanctity. My suspicion is that the editors of the NYT must think similarly, because they ran another review a few days later, which isn’t their standard practice. It wasn’t a great review either, but it struck me as much fairer.
   Either way, it seems to be a novel that strikes up much debate, and debating ideas is a whole lot of fun, so good has come to all of us.

10. Robert J. Wiersema says:
    June 25th, 2010 at 12:52 pm

    Sorry, Steven, I’m just not seeing that subtext. In the slightest.

    There’s nothing that hints that Martel didn’t have a “right” to that story, not being Jewish.

    And on the area of trivialization, you write: “When she says that his use of animals as metaphor for the Jews “trivializes” the holocaust, and calls the work “offensive” she’s saying it loud and clear” — Steven, she doesn’t say this. At all. It’s the use of the Holocaust as a metaphor for “animal extermination” which she feels is trivializing, and I think that’s fair comment, and not at all the same thing. This is the same piece, additionally, which extolls the virtues of Maus, saying it “did not diminish the event, but instead goaded the reader into looking at the Holocaust anew”. Clearly there is no issue with the use of animals as metaphor…

    Maybe there’s subtext there, and I just can’t see it. But when it comes to sweeping statements like “the general problem Martel faced with this book – that many critics recoil from the very idea of a Holocaust novel written by an author who is neither Jewish nor basing his work, as with Schindler’s Ark, on some sanctified piece of history”, I really, really want to see some actual evidence of it in the text.

11. Steven Galloway says:
    June 26th, 2010 at 12:28 am

    I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree. Unless, of course, you’d like to agree I’m right. Either works for me.

Discuss