SIMON PARSONS is discomfited by an unflichingly negative portrait of motherhood and its trials
Genocide, then and now
FIONA O’CONNOR detects contemporary relevance in the depiction of a society heading into the abyss while the world does nothing
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Adieu Birkenau
By Ginette Kolinka, JD Morvan and Victor Matet, SelfMadeHero, £19.99
IN our present predicament this graphic novel, written by a survivor of Nazi extermination camps, is a valiant testament to the power of witness.
Ginette Kolinka is a Parisian Jew halfway through her ninth decade. In 1941 she and her family escaped Nazi Paris only to be arrested by German authorities in the free zone.
She was imprisoned and then transferred to the SS-controlled internment camp at Drancy. As part of “the Final Solution” she was transported with her father and her younger brother, Gilbert, to Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
More from this author
The phrase “cruel to be kind” comes from Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Prince didn’t go in for kidnap, explosive punches, and cigarette deprivation. Tam is different.
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ANGUS REID deconstructs a popular contemporary novel aimed at a ‘queer’ young adult readership
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A landmark work of gay ethnography, an avant-garde fusion of folk and modernity, and a chance comment in a great interview
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ANGUS REID applauds the inventive stagecraft with which the Lyceum serve up Stevenson’s classic, but misses the deeper themes
Similar stories
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GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
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FIONA O’CONNOR relishes an artfully restrained novel whose style is perfectly in tune with the petit bourgeois existence it portrays
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MARIA DUARTE is chilled by a documentary that brings together the son of Rudolf Hoss with a Jewish Auschwitz survivor
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FIONA O’CONNOR assesses a dense and overpopulated novel that isn’t satire and doesn’t go deep