2.5 STARS

"he last live broadcast on Polish Radio, on September 23, 1939, was Chopin's Nocturne in C# Minor, played by a young pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman, until his playing was interrupted by German shelling. It was the same piece and the same pianist, when broadcasting resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years inbetween, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse."' (From Amazon)

A good memoir of a Polish man during WWII. To be honest I do not remember the movie or book very well.

Nokturno u cis-molu, pored svoje jednostavnosti i melodičnosti, je nakon WW2 dobio još jednu novu emociju, koja se čvrsto vezala za to delo. Špilman ju je stvorio, prvo onomad kada je poslednji put svirao pred bombardovanje Varšave, pa tokom Nemačke okupacije pred oficirom koji ga je spasao. I na kraju, posle rata, na istom mestu kao i prvi put, samo pet godina kasnije.
Ipak, ovo je autobiografski spis, memoar koji je napisan pomalo sirovo; Špilman nije hteo da preuveličava neke scene niti da ih bogati detaljima, ali one same po sebi jesu upečatljive i jake zbog samih događaja.
Veoma surov prikaz tadašnje stvarnosti, ne samo borbe protiv Jevreja, već i njihove lakomislenosti, naivnosti koja ih je uvela u propast jer su verovali lažima Nemaca. Pa onda i druga strana medalje, ljudi koji su pomagali, od Poljaka do Nemaca, kao što je bio i Hozenfeld koji je spasao ne samo Špilmana već i mnoge druge ljude, i decu... Odlomke iz njegovog dnevnika takođe imamo ovde predstavljene, pa se može videti kako je bio lažan onaj stav koji je uzela Nemačka javnost nakon rata- da niko ništa nije znao o logorima. Sve se to prećutkivalo manje-više.
Pored toga, knjiga mi nije bolja od filma, nekako je Polanski dobrano iskoristio i pojačao emociju, a ovde je ona pomalo izostavljena, kao namerno istrgnuta stranica.

Rating: 5 stars

So I committed the ultimate book-lover sin: I watched the movie before I read the book. I know, I know, I should be birched publicly before the Hall like a disgraced Aes Sedai. But in my defence... no, I have no defence. I knew it was a book, I had access to said book, and I still watched the movie first.

But let me cut straight to the chase: this book was incredible. Brilliant. Stunning. Shocking. Mesmerising. All the other positive adjectives you can find in the thesaurus (that I can't be bothered looking up right now). It truly raised the bar for what a memoir can be for me. There is little I would change about this book. I would even go as far as saying there is nothing I would change about this book. And there are very few pieces of media for which I can say that.

Despite being someone's memoir, The Pianist never felt boring to me. It was so gripping (not in a fake way, like the events were dramatised for entertainment). I never got bored. This maybe due to the fact that Szpilman wrote it in 1946, so it was recorded after everything, and it doesn’t draw from rambling diaries he made during the war (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just can get a bit... dry. I'm looking at you Anne Frank). But Szpilman was writing from memory, so therefore the only things that stuck in his mind were the most important things. There was no excess blabbering and it made it so much more enjoyable. And he had a lot of ground to cover - he spent six years in Nazi occupied Poland as a Jew, so you can expect quite a lot happened. Yet, he managed to keep it down to 200ish pages by trimming all the excess, and it still never felt lacking in information.

Crap, I'm just rambling at this point. I've had to cut out so many paragraphs of nonsense, because everything about this book was great. Man, I could quote the whole book here. Even though Szpilman's son prefaces the book by saying his father was a musician and not a writer, there were some beautiful quotes. I'm not sure if it's just the translation, or maybe even the translator, but the writing was really good.

But yeah. Need to end it here. I can say with a fair amount of confidence that The Pianist is one of, if not the, best non-fiction book I have ever read. I can't stop thinking about it.

Es increíble todo lo que este hombre tuvo que soportar, creo que yo me hubiese muerto de depresión... No sé cómo pudo con todo lo que pasaba a su alrededor, ver el destino de su familia y sus amigos... No puedo siquiera imaginar qué se siente. Es algo que admirar. Me he informando bastante sobre este tema porque me interesa y definitivamente vale la pena leer libros así porque uno no comprende en realidad todo lo que sufrió esa gente hasta que lee historias así, es la verdad absoluta, no hay nada oculto, no hay embellecimientos... Esto te hace darte cuenta de lo frágiles que son todas esas buenas cualidades humanas.

Y en otro orden de ideas, la película le hace muy buena justicia al libro. El único detalle es que me hubiese gustado que en la película hubiesen mostrado un poco más la humanidad del Hauptmann Wilm Hosenfeld, el Nazi que lo ayudó, pero eso es todo.
Ambas cosas dignas de tener, el libro y la película.
:Michelle's seal of approval: