Posted on January 6, 2020 at 2:27 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
The Auschwitz Memorial Museum is back in the literary news, this time correcting author John Boyne.
Literary Hub shared, via the Irish Times, how Boyne, who wrote the 2006 bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, had taken to Twitter to complain about how Auschwitz has become a sort of genre in fiction.
“The subject matter, & their titles, should be treated with a little more thought & consideration,” he tweeted.
That’s obviously an opinion shared by the Auschwitz Memorial Museum — which, however, added that it had pointed out several errors in Boyne’s own work.
Boyne didn’t exactly accept this response gracefully or humbly, instead complaining that the museum’s post about his book’s inaccuracies contained the wrong year for when it was adapted into a movie, the wrong sale total, and the wrong adjective for the film.
At any rate, this type of dispute is new for neither party.
The Auschwitz Memorial Museum has expressed significant concerns with one of the books Boyne highlighted, the bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz (as well as its sequel, Cilka’s Journey).
Boyne, meanwhile, drew criticism for his book My Brother’s Name is Jessica, about a boy struggling to understand why his older sibling was transitioning, because it focused on the cisgender child rather than the transgender one.
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Categories: Today in Books