Lovely Green Eyes

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Lovely Green Eyes is a novel first published in the Czech language in 2000, by Arnošt Lustig.[1] Lustig is a holocaust survivor. The novel is written as if it were the memoir of a teenage holocaust survivor, as recounted by her husband, also a holocaust survivor.

The heroine, Hanka Kaudersov, known by the nicknames, "skinny", and "lovely green eyes", was sent to Birkenau, in 1944, saw her younger brother and mother sent to the gas chambers, and her father commit suicide by charging the camp fence. She gets a promotion to working in a lab conducting unethical medical experiments. The eccentric director of the lab had his workers issued civilian clothes. When the lab is shut down unexpectedly, when the director is punished by being sent to the Russian Front, she has an unexpected opportunity to become a "Feldhorer" - a "field whore".

Most of the novel revolves around her co-workers and the soldiers she serviced.[1]

While the heroine was in the unethical medical lab she has her ovaries subjected to xray doses she is told will be strong enough to sterilize her.

The novel has been translated into multiple languages, including English and French. When it was translated into English it was under consideration for a Pullitzer Prize.[1]

While Lustig was a highly regarded author, in Czechoslovakia, and the Czech republic, this book, or at least the English language translation, is substandard.

  • Post-war chapters, where she and a rabbi share their grief for lost relatives, precede chapters immediately preceding the German surrender - as if neither Lustig or his editor, ever reviewed the publisher's proofs.
  • The English translation repeats that the heroine only worked in the brothel for 21 days. Yet she started working there in the fall of 1944. We know this as one of her Johns, a friendly officer, spoke of hoping his next leave would allow him to celebrate Christmas with her. December 1944 to the German surrender in April 1945? It is within a few weeks of 21 weeks. I strongly suspect the Czech original has our heroine work in the brothel for 21 weeks, not 21 days.
  • The book is full of artifacts of poorly performed optical character recognition. Spaces inserted into the middle of words? Common. Lustig included paragraphs consisting solely of twelve German surnames. These really required being put in bold, or in a different font, to make them stand out. Our heroine and her colleagues were expected to sleep with twelve soldiers a day. It took me a long time to figure out that these paragraphs were supposed to mark the passage of one more day - they were the names of the twelve soldiers she slept with that day.

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Alice Horáčkov (2003-04-08). "Lustig Pulitzerovu cenu nedostal" (in Czech). Idnes. Archived from the original on 2020-04-17. https://web.archive.org/web/20200417210427/https://www.idnes.cz/kultura/literatura/lustig-pulitzerovu-cenu-nedostal.A030328_195025_literatura_lf. Retrieved 2021-06-27. "Mezi adepty na letošní Pulitzerovu cenu v oblasti beletrie byl také český spisovatel s americkým občanstvím Arnošt Lustig. Do světově prestižního klání vstoupil s románem Krásné zelené oči, který vyšel roku 2000 česky a loni se objevil v anglickém překladu na britských a amerických pultech."