The Book Thief

Yesterday the postman delivered my latest order from Amazon, which contained, among other things, "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak.

Since it was a rainy day and I was too sick to go out anyway, I started reading it as soon as I put Andrej to bed for his afternoon nap. Roughly five and half hours and 550 pages later I was done and I put it down with mixed feelings.

It's a story about a nine-year old girl who lives with a foster family in a small German town of Molching, on the eve of the WWII. She steals a book after her brother's funeral and so begins her book thievery, her uneasy relationship with written words and her growing up in the midst of one of the most awful periods of modern history.

Her story is narrated by the Death himself, which gives us a unique perspective. He intersperses the narration with his own commentary--sometimes witty and funny, other times a bit awkward, or just off the mark (Talking about the work he had to do after the Battle of Stalingrad: "It was no ski trip, I can tell you." Huh?)

I liked the way Zusak builds the storyline and I definitely don't agree with those reviewers who said the book was boring. It's not, but it does have many flaws and one of the bigger ones, for me, is that his characters are quite stereotypical and two-dimensional. There is not enough life to them so we can't see their motivation, why they do the things they do. Liesel's father is a simple man but with a good heart; her mother is a big and foul-mouthed woman but she too, turns out, has a heart of gold. And the bad guys are very bad, and that's that. This kind of characterization is typical for fairy tales and children's stories but this book is supposed to be for adults so it doesn't work.

I also had an impression that he is using the Nazi Germany settings and references to Hitler and the camps to create shortcuts to powerful emotions that he is not capable of creating by his narrative. It's easy to piggyback on the Holocaust but infinitely more difficult to add value to its story and I don't think Zusak succeeds there. There is certainly potential, and he takes an interesting angle--a German family that helps a Jewish man and suffers consequences--but he can't really decide which story he wants to tell. Is it about suffering of the good Germans, or is it about a little girl discovering life through books, or is it about how difficult it is to be Death?

And there are passages like this one:

"You see, people may tell you that Nazi Germany was built on anti-Semitism, a somewhat overzealous leader and a nation of hate-fed bigots, but it would have all come to nothing had the Germans not loved one particular activity--to burn.

The Germans loved to burn things. Shops, synagogues, Rechstags, houses, personal items, slain people, and, of course, books."

This is not literature. At best it's a history lesson masking as literature and it's completely unnecessary--all of a sudden Death speaks with a voice from the 21st century. Zusak is trying to tell a complex story but with simplistic comments like this he just shoots himself in the foot.

All in all, interesting story and lots of clever devices but Zusak's ability is a poor match for his ambition.