Scanning the Bookshelf

In 2005, prolific writer Francine Prose was starting her 15th work of fiction. This novel was to have a 13-year-old girl as its main character and narrator. So Prose decided to reread "Diary of a Young Girl," which she hadn't picked up since her youth. Prose's reason was simple: "The greatest book ever written about a 13-year-old girl was Anne Frank's diary."

The new novel, "Goldengrove," progressed well. It's a dark, coming-of-age story that came out in 2008, to almost uniformly effusive reviews. But her reading of the diary ultimately produced another book, which made its appearance in September, the equally well-received "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife."

No one, Prose included, would argue that Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" hasn't been taken seriously. It has sold millions of copies in many languages and become the stuff of multiple plays and a feature film. There have been numerous studies of the book, as well as biographies of Anne and her family. It is also on several lists of the most influential books of the 20th century.

But no one has made the case as convincingly and forcefully as Prose that Anne aspired to be taken seriously as a writer — and should be.

"I think there is resistance to seeing the book that way, because she was a girl," says Prose, speaking by telephone from her home in New York.

Already, Prose says, her book is being classified as Judaica, which is to miss its essential reason for being: It is an impassioned essay on Frank as a writer and on the fate of her story.

Prose also offers a compelling chronicle of Anne's story, as it has taken shape in theater and film and as it had been discussed and debated in classrooms, blogs and books.

Of course, Anne Frank's is a saga of living under extreme peril and duress. The entries begin shortly before the Frank family goes into hiding in June 1942, when her sister Margot receives an order to report for work, which meant being shipped to a Nazi labor camp. It ends with their arrest in August 1944, which led to the death in concentration camps of all but her father, Otto.

Beginning in the spring of 1944, Prose explains, Anne Frank set out to revise the diary from beginning to end, even as she kept adding to it.

"Seeing how it all came together affected me the most," she says, "how it became a book."

Or, as Prose puts it in "Anne Frank," "Anne had wanted her book to be noticed, to be read, and she spent her last months of relative freedom desperately attempting to make sure that her wish might some day be granted."

To find out more about Robert Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM