The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman

Basics

Title: The Pianist

Author: Wladyslaw Szpilman

Orginally published: 1998

Pages: 222
Genre: Biography

Plot

The Pianist is a book based on the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman and his survival during WWII in Warsawa. I don’t want to go into too much detail since I prefer not knowing too much of a book before I read it. I will tell you the basics. Wladyslaw is a Jew who works at a radio station as a pianist before the Germans invade Poland. As they do, the Germans “wipe out” the Jews from the city, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. As mentioned earlier, the plot surrounds Wladyslaw as he moves around the city, to live in various absurd conditions as he tries to hide from the Germans. There is an Academy Award-winning movie based on the book which I highly recommend watching after you finished the book.

My Thoughts:

I went in to this book with high expectations. I had seen the film a few years earlier and still consider it to be one of my favourite films about the holocaust and second world war. I originally read the book for a school assignment. We had a list of works to choose from and The Pianist immediately caught my eye. So I read it. To be honest, I’m still not sure what my final thoughts on the book are. Despite its heavy topic, it was a fairly quick read. The plot goes on quite quickly, and the language was easy-read, yet still sophisticated.  Szpilman is great at describing environments in a raw form and does not exaggerate with pro-longed sentences to create an unnecessary dramatic effect. Sometimes, that is beneficial for the writing style, however, I liked that Szpilman kept it simple. You still get a good view of what is happening.

We have mainly two characters in the novel, Wladyslaw himself, and a soldier who is unnamed. I expected the soldier to be featured more in the novel, since he plays such a big part in the movie, however, it is not until the end of the book that we meet him. I found the side characters to be quite dull, not much of description, nor do we know much about their personalities. I understand that you can’t “connect” to a character in this situation, however, the only character I cared about was Wladyslaw. Perhaps that’s the whole point.

As a whole, I really liked this book. I had never read anything about the holocaust before and it is a great starter. It isn’t too long, nor too graphic. I find it hard to rate this book and I feel like I should read it second time before doing so, but for the sake of the review I will place my current rating below.

Next review coming up: Miss Peregrin's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

/Ingrid