Book Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Book Review: The Book Thief

Author: Markus Zusak

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Release Date: 2006

I picked up this book because it's about someone who steals books and thus starts a love affair with words. How could I not read it?

The year is 1939, in Nazi Germany. Liesel Meminger becomes the book thief at the same time that she joins a foster family, both of which change her life. When her foster family decides to harbor a Jew in the basement, Liesel's world is both opened up and closed down by the power of words. Death himself narrates Liesel's story, about her journeys learning to read and to make sense of the world and the war around her.

There are two major techniques present that make me absolutely love this book. The first is Death's role as narrator. How does a writer get any more creative than that? Because of his role, Death becomes as much of a character as any human in the story. Death most often talks to readers in the usual paragraph form, but sometimes he uses something like an aside in a play to interrupt himself or the story to provide another point of view or pertinent fact, a lot like this example from the prologue.

****HERE IS A SMALL FACT****

You are going to die.

If you ask Death, he'll tell you he does that to distract himself. Distraction is his vacation from collecting the dead, since he's the only one who can do his job. Because of his role, Death becomes as much of a character as any human in the story. In the prologue and his introduction he says, "I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice." By using Death as the narrator, Zusak also makes great use of foreshadowing, since Death is looking back on the story as he tells it and because he knows what ultimately happens to every person in the story.

The other technique in this book that I love actually isn't a technique at all. It's a matter of style. Zusak phrases things in the most interesting and provocative way I think I've ever read. He often combines verbs and objects to be affected by the verbs in unusual ways. For example, Death tells us in the prologue that a formal introduction isn't necessary, because we'll all meet him eventually, when he'll be standing over us ("as genially as possible") to collect our dying souls. "At that moment," he says, "you will be caked in your own body. There might be a discovery; a scream will dribble down the air." I've never thought of my soul as being caked inside my body, or of a scream as something that dribbles. Zusak's syntax style extends throughout the book and to other parts of speech, such as when Liesel's foster parents decide to harbor a Jew in the basement and the weather outside reflects the misery inside: "Outside, a mountain of cold November air was waiting at the front door each time Liesel left the house. Drizzle came down in spades. Dead leaves were slumped on the road." I doubt I've ever seen leaves slump, and I hope I never run into a mountain of cold air.

The beginnig is a bit slow, and towards the end of the book it gets sad. I admit I cried. Even Death is appalled at what's happening in Germany in 1944. The words Liesel loves and hates so much can only save her, not the other things she loves when her town in bombed. But the very end, the epilogue, has a good ending. Something else she loves survives the war, and Death talks to her face to face, wondering how mankind "could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant." It's a universal uncomprehending.

The Book Thief is a great read to see another side of the Nazi Germany story, about normal Germans living ordinary lives and helping their Jewish friends. The book also received several starred reviews and many, many awards, including the New York Times #1 Bestseller, the National Jewish Book Award, the Publisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year, and the Booklist Best Book of the Year, among many others. As a starred review from The Horn Book Magazine put it, this book is "a tour de force that to be not just read but inhabited." Plus, it just feels good to hold it in your hands.