The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Feb. 16th, 2008 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath.
Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Merminger's life is changed when, by her brother's graveside, she picks up an object, partially hiden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up and closed down.
Markus Zusak has come up with a story that has an interesting perspective on ordinary life in Nazi Germany, the treatment of the Jews and also the impact of Allied bombing on German towns during the war. I particularly liked the way in which he weaves in drawings to his plot and the sections that come from Max Vandenburg (the Jew who is being hidden by Liesel's adoptive parents) and I thought that those sections were the most moving in the book.
Zusak shows the moral dilemma faced by ordinary Germans through the character of Hans Hubermann, Liesel's foster father to whom she grows close as he teaches her to read. A sympathetic character, we get a lot of background on Hans and why he makes the decisions he does - he never fails to come across as a very human human, one who is deeply troubled by the treatment being handed out to the Jewish community. Also surprisingly sympathetic is Hans's wife, Rosa, a woman with a face like paper who berates both foster daughter and husband alike, but who is shown time and time again to have a heart of gold. Lisel's friend Rudy is set up from the start as a tragic character, and at times I felt that Zusak slightly over-emphasises what is going to happen to him, which softens the eventual impact. Still, he is also sympathetically produced and some of his adventures (such as blacking himself up to imitate his hero, Jesse Owens) are amusing and you can appreciate his courage whilst also pitying his love for Liesel.
Strangely, Liesel was the character I had the most problems with in the book, mainly because we don't get the background on her that we do with the other characters. For example, we meet her when she's being taken to the fostering agency by her mother. We learn that her mother and father were Communists (although we never really learn what has happened to her father) and her mother is having her and her brother fostered to try and keep them safe from Nazi persecution. Unfortunately, the mother then disappears from the story and we never learn what happens to her. We also never learn what she was doing with her children in the years up to the fostering - we know that Liesel cannot read (indeed, this is the incentive for her book thievery, which she does so she can learn to read well and through which she develops a love of language and literature) but we don't know why her mother didn't teach her. I was disappointed that Zusak doesn't make more of the persecution of the Communists (or indeed the other ethnic groups regarded as inferior by the Nazis) as this is something that tends to get forgotten in the unbelievable horror of the Holocaust. Liesel's book thievery is something of a misnomer - with the exception of that first book, for the most part she's either rescuing books that people don't want or she's borrowing books with other people's permission and I found it irritating to have her constantly labelled as a thief.
Zusak has Death narrating Liesel's story and I never really understood why he should be so drawn to this girl in particular, given that whilst she does suffer in the book, her suffering seems no greater or less than other people existing at the time. I also found Death to be amazingly verbose at times and this contributed to a feeling that the book is over-written, particularly in the beginning third when Death rhapsodises about the colour of the sky as he goes about his work. This over-writing does spoil the first half and the excessive use of similes (sometimes falling two or three to a page) really gets in the way of the story. Death has this tick of inserting small paragraphs into the middle of the text that either give a definition or a small block of background to the action and whilst there are times when this is quite effective, I think it's used too often, which lessens the effectiveness and again, gets in the way of the story.
I'm also not convinced that the time jumps worked in the context of the book - Zusak shows some things out of order, which I found to be confusing at times and reduces the narrative tension at times when it should be wound up tight. Finally, Zusak is in the school of writing that tries to bring authenticity to the text by putting parts of the dialogue in German and then translating it immediately afterwards, e.g. "Ja," she said. "Yes." Personally, this drives me completely crazy because it's essentially having a character say the same thing twice and if anything, draws attention to the artificiality of the situation (but this is a personal thing and I realise other people probably won't feel as strongly).
In general though, I think this is one of the best books I've read to deal with Holocaust and it does so in a way that doesn't seek to lessen the effect on the reader and whilst I wish that the author had reined back on his similes, it's still a book I'd recommend to adults and children alike.
The Verdict:
This is most definitely an over-written book, but there are some very moving moments in the text (particularly in those segments where the author uses drawings to emphasise his message) and Zusak has produced a book on the Holocaust that shows the impact on ordinary people whilst also making you think about the effect of Allied bombing on Germany during World War II. On that basis alone, I think that this is worth a look.
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath.
Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Merminger's life is changed when, by her brother's graveside, she picks up an object, partially hiden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up and closed down.
Markus Zusak has come up with a story that has an interesting perspective on ordinary life in Nazi Germany, the treatment of the Jews and also the impact of Allied bombing on German towns during the war. I particularly liked the way in which he weaves in drawings to his plot and the sections that come from Max Vandenburg (the Jew who is being hidden by Liesel's adoptive parents) and I thought that those sections were the most moving in the book.
Zusak shows the moral dilemma faced by ordinary Germans through the character of Hans Hubermann, Liesel's foster father to whom she grows close as he teaches her to read. A sympathetic character, we get a lot of background on Hans and why he makes the decisions he does - he never fails to come across as a very human human, one who is deeply troubled by the treatment being handed out to the Jewish community. Also surprisingly sympathetic is Hans's wife, Rosa, a woman with a face like paper who berates both foster daughter and husband alike, but who is shown time and time again to have a heart of gold. Lisel's friend Rudy is set up from the start as a tragic character, and at times I felt that Zusak slightly over-emphasises what is going to happen to him, which softens the eventual impact. Still, he is also sympathetically produced and some of his adventures (such as blacking himself up to imitate his hero, Jesse Owens) are amusing and you can appreciate his courage whilst also pitying his love for Liesel.
Strangely, Liesel was the character I had the most problems with in the book, mainly because we don't get the background on her that we do with the other characters. For example, we meet her when she's being taken to the fostering agency by her mother. We learn that her mother and father were Communists (although we never really learn what has happened to her father) and her mother is having her and her brother fostered to try and keep them safe from Nazi persecution. Unfortunately, the mother then disappears from the story and we never learn what happens to her. We also never learn what she was doing with her children in the years up to the fostering - we know that Liesel cannot read (indeed, this is the incentive for her book thievery, which she does so she can learn to read well and through which she develops a love of language and literature) but we don't know why her mother didn't teach her. I was disappointed that Zusak doesn't make more of the persecution of the Communists (or indeed the other ethnic groups regarded as inferior by the Nazis) as this is something that tends to get forgotten in the unbelievable horror of the Holocaust. Liesel's book thievery is something of a misnomer - with the exception of that first book, for the most part she's either rescuing books that people don't want or she's borrowing books with other people's permission and I found it irritating to have her constantly labelled as a thief.
Zusak has Death narrating Liesel's story and I never really understood why he should be so drawn to this girl in particular, given that whilst she does suffer in the book, her suffering seems no greater or less than other people existing at the time. I also found Death to be amazingly verbose at times and this contributed to a feeling that the book is over-written, particularly in the beginning third when Death rhapsodises about the colour of the sky as he goes about his work. This over-writing does spoil the first half and the excessive use of similes (sometimes falling two or three to a page) really gets in the way of the story. Death has this tick of inserting small paragraphs into the middle of the text that either give a definition or a small block of background to the action and whilst there are times when this is quite effective, I think it's used too often, which lessens the effectiveness and again, gets in the way of the story.
I'm also not convinced that the time jumps worked in the context of the book - Zusak shows some things out of order, which I found to be confusing at times and reduces the narrative tension at times when it should be wound up tight. Finally, Zusak is in the school of writing that tries to bring authenticity to the text by putting parts of the dialogue in German and then translating it immediately afterwards, e.g. "Ja," she said. "Yes." Personally, this drives me completely crazy because it's essentially having a character say the same thing twice and if anything, draws attention to the artificiality of the situation (but this is a personal thing and I realise other people probably won't feel as strongly).
In general though, I think this is one of the best books I've read to deal with Holocaust and it does so in a way that doesn't seek to lessen the effect on the reader and whilst I wish that the author had reined back on his similes, it's still a book I'd recommend to adults and children alike.
The Verdict:
This is most definitely an over-written book, but there are some very moving moments in the text (particularly in those segments where the author uses drawings to emphasise his message) and Zusak has produced a book on the Holocaust that shows the impact on ordinary people whilst also making you think about the effect of Allied bombing on Germany during World War II. On that basis alone, I think that this is worth a look.
