Book Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Gravedigger’s Handbook is the first book Liesel steals. She’s illiterate at the time, but her brother’s just been buried, and the book one of the gravediggers dropped looks important. And it will be important, as Liesel learns to read from that book.
It would be tough enough to lose a brother at Liesel’s young age, but she loses her mother almost immediately thereafter, and is adopted by Hans and Rosa Hubermann. The Hubermanns have never been more than working poor, and things have gotten worse since Hans’ application to join the Nazi Party was stalled because of his kindness towards Jews. For this is Germany in the late 1930s, and things are about to get worse for everyone.
Liesel must learn to read, steal books as the opportunity arises, and survive in a society gone mad. But given that the narrator of this story is Death, will anyone survive to its end?
To my younger audience: It’s okay to like books that are popular and “everyone is reading” even if the critics think they’re garbage. But it’s also okay to not like popular books, even if they’re critical darlings.
And so it is with me and this book. Even though it’s the literary equivalent of “Oscar bait”, the writing left me cold. It felt pretentious and “trying too hard”, and scenes that were clearly meant to be tearjerkers found me stonehearted and emotionless.
This doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. Death’s focus on colors and outsider perspective on human life gives the book an innovative feel. Also, the look at “the little people” of Germany and how the poison of Nazism twisted their lives, some willingly, others less so, is worth the reading.
While the main viewpoint character is a child, this book is not for children. There’s constant references to the Holocaust, a character commits suicide, and profanity (in German and in some cases old-fashioned) is frequent. And again, Death is the narrator.
The edition I read had an interview with the author (while Liesel bears a strong resemblance to his mother, and some incidents are based on her childhood memories, she is very much not the same person) and fragments of the draft manuscripts.
Recommended to fans of Oscar-bait books, who are likely to get far more out of this book than I did.
And now, the movie trailer!
