The Book Thief (thoughts)

Let me preface this: I try to avoid the Holocaust. I mean, I'm aware that it happened, and I find it inexpressibly sad, but I refuse to watch movies about it. Inevitably, I start crying so hard that I can't see the screen, so it's pointless anyway. I also avoid war movies for the same reason; I can cry at anything involving soldiers. I cried at Pirates of the Caribbean (when the British soldiers are valiantly, hopelessly fighting the immortal pirates): obviously, I have a bit of a problem. It's taken me almost an entire year to read Samantha Power's Pulitzer-winning A Problem From Hell: America in an Age of Genocide. Each chapter chronicles a different genocide, and I can only handle one every month or so. So, although I've read numerous rave reviews about The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, I had no intention of reading it. Much as I loved the idea of Death as a narrator, I just didn't think I could bring myself to read a book set in Nazi Germany.

And then, as I was browsing the shelves of my library, I saw it sitting there.

And it had a super-cool cover.

And no one else had checked it out.

And that just seemed wrong.

Long story short, I checked it out on Thursday, and started reading it yesterday. I got up to around page 400, then this morning I woke up and finished the rest. As expected, this morning was a tearfest. I was sobbing and shaking and whimpering into a blanket. Needless to say, I was very glad to be alone. I was also very glad that I had read it.

A lot of you have already read this book, or at least heard about it. For those of you who may not, a one-sentence summary. Liesel is a pre-teen in Nazi Germany, whose life Death became interested in, so he's now sharing with us the formative years, from when she was 11 to when she was 14.

When you pick up a book like this, you know it's going to be tragic. I mean, there will be light points, and some characters might end well, but you know that for the majority of characters, something bad will happen. Furthermore, Death foreshadows throughout the book, so the reader knows the ending by about half way through. But the ending isn't the point: it's the getting there that matters.

First of all, I loved the way this book was published. It uses several type scripts, including a special bold centered one with astericks for Death's asides. It makes the book all the more interesting. Also, a certain character within the book ends up making his own book. He paints white over the pages of Mein Kampf and then draws and writes his own stories. Several of these pages are included within the book, and it's just so cool to look at. When I got to the first of these selections, I knew that I was in the hands of an incredible author.

Also, Zusak freely mixes German in with the English. He does it in a way that the reader always knows what the words mean, but the little sprinklings provide a lot of authenticity. The setting is essential to this book, and the author really brings it alive. You know that you're in Germany, and that you couldn't possibly be anywhere else.

This is the kind of book that gets under your skin: at first, you know you're enjoying it, then slowly you realise you don't want to put it down, and finally, even though you know it's going to be horrible, you have to keep reading until the bitter end. And trust me, Zusak delivers.

For me, the real magic of the book is that part of it is simply a coming of age story. Liesel learns more about herself, more about others, and experiences the ups and downs of puberty. The way that Zusak mixes this in with insights into Nazi Germany makes this much more than a WWII/Holocaust book. It's a book that explores how people hate, and how people love, and, ultimately, the incredible power of words over peoples' lives. It's triumphant, tragic, heartrending, and all of those other adjectives whose use has become hackneyed. This book breathes fresh life into all of them.

All in all, I'd say that this is the kind of book that everyone should read, since it's essentially about humanity. However, I'd also caution readers to make sure they don't have company when they're reading the end; Zusak knows just how to bring out emotions. This isn't a beach book by any means, but it's an important book.

I'm not going to share favourite passages yet; the book is still too raw for me to go back and find them. Perhaps I'll add them eventually.