Note to Self Form

The story told by the book, ingeniously through very short quotes from survivors and photographs of the area around the camp, as well as survivor portraits, is of a little-known corner of Fascist genocide: Concentration camps run by Italian Fascists and set up to murder Slavs. The nearest Slavs were Slovenians, and the main camp explored in this book is one in Gonars, between Venice and the Slovenian border. What makes “Guardians of the Spoon” particularly clever is the use of the spiral notebook. After the first few pages, the section of photographs and quotes from survivors remembering their ordeals are cut in two, and the binder becomes a flip book. You can flip through the upper and lower registers independently, offering a sort of mix and match of which piece of text and which photograph you look at together. It has enough of the school days feel to it that it encourages at once a childlike delight in flipping through, a feeling that one is being schooled in an important history lesson, but also the grim content.