What Book to Read?

I notice that I have recently posted about several books that deal with Jewish experience in Europe up to and including World War II. That experience was so terrible and so memorable that it’s hardly surprising that many writers want to explore it. In addition to Jewish experience, this book also looks at a slice of German war-time experience and while the view is scarcely typical, it is a humane and moving one.

Liesel Meminger, the book thief of the title, is a young girl who lives with foster parents in a small town just outside Munich in the early years of the war. Her story is told, most unusually, by Death. ‘I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough … It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms … I will carry you gently away.’  As narrator, Death comments on the action, and sometimes complains of his workload, but does not intervene in the story; he merely puts it forward as an attempt ‘to prove to me that you, and your human existence are worth it.’

It is, as Death says a ‘small story’. Liesel and her brother are travelling with their mother to meet foster parents who, though are scarcely less poverty stricken than she is, will give them a home. But the boy dies, and after he has been buried, Liesel picks up a book that one of the grave diggers has dropped – her first book theft. After a difficult beginning, Liesel comes to love her foster parents, especially her Papa Hans, who teaches her to read and opens up to her the joy of words. She makes friends with the boy next door; they play and eventually steal together, first food, then books.  She begins writing her own story –The Book Thief. Against this coming of age story is set the realities of Nazi power and Germany at war, brought home with compelling force when Hans agrees to hide a young Jewish man in his basement.  Death tells the reader in a preface how it will all end. Or as he (?) says later: ‘I don’t have much interest in building mystery … It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest and astound me.’ Thus Liesel’s simple, even domestic tale acquires a broader relevance and meaning.

The other notable thing about the book is Zusak’s style of writing. Throughout, there are asides from Death, almost directives to the reader, which stand out in the text by being indented. For example: A Guided Tour of Suffering.

To your left, perhaps your right,
perhaps even straight ahead,
You find a small back room.
In it sits a Jew.
He is scum. He is starving.
He is afraid,
Please – try not to look away.

These give the story a bitterly wry note. There is further very dry humour in asides such as a comment on Jews being marched through the town to the nearby Dachau camp: ‘They were going to Dachau, to concentrate.’ But most of all it is Zusak’s unusual use of language that is so striking. In an early description of Liesel, ‘you could still see the bite marks of snow on her hands’. Frau Diller had ‘a refrigerated voice and even breath that smelt like Heil Hitler’. At a bonfire of books to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, ‘The orange flames waved at the crowd… Burning words were torn from their sentences’. And in the air-raid shelter, ‘Stillness was shackled to their faces’. This extensive use of metaphor is startling, and effective.

Liesel’s story comes to stand for broader issues about German responsibility for the Holocaust. Some of the characters in the book are active Nazis, most go along with Nazism, and a few stand against it. Not surprisingly it is Death that makes the judgement: ‘The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. The basement was not a washroom.’

Zusak was born in 1975, and before this (2005) had written fiction for older teenagers. The Book Thief is a remarkable achievement.  You can see here what he says about his next book.