'The Book Thief'
Author: Markus Zuzak
Publisher: Black Swan / 2007
Pages: 554
This book is a historical fiction novel by the Australian author Markus Zuzak, set in Nazi Germany during World War II.
The book became an international bestseller and was translated into 63 languages and sold 17 million copies. It was also adapted into the 2013 feature film, The Book Thief.
The book is a story narrated by a compassionate Death who tells us about Liesel, a girl growing up in Germany during World War II. Death has in his possession the book she wrote about these years. So, in a way, they are both book thieves. Liesel steals books randomly at first, and later more methodically, but she's never greedy. Death pockets Liesel's notebook after she leaves it, forgotten in her grief, among the destruction that was once her street, her home, and carries it with him.
Liesel is effectively an orphan. She never knew her father, while her mother, a Communist, disappears after delivering her to her new foster parents, and her younger brother died on the train to the fictional town of Molching near Munich where the foster parents live.
Death first encounters nine-year-old Liesel when her brother dies, and hangs around long enough to watch her steal her first book, The Gravedigger's Handbook, left lying in the snow by her brother's grave.
Her foster parents, Hans and Rosa Herbermann, are poor Germans given a small allowance to take her in. Hans, a tall quiet man with silver eyes, is a painter of houses and plays the accordion. He teaches Liesel how to read and write. Rosa is gruff and swears a lot but has a big heart, and does laundry for rich people in the town.
Liesel becomes best friends with her neighbour Rudy, a boy with "hair the colour of lemons" who idolises the black Olympic champion sprinter Jesse Owens.
One night a Jew turns up in their home. He's the son of a friend of Hans from the first world war, the man who taught him the accordion, whose widowed wife Hans promised to help if she ever needed it.
Hans is a German who does not hate Jews, though he knows the risk he and his family are taking, letting Max live in the basement.
Max and Liesel become close friends, and he writes an absolutely beautiful story for her, called The Standover Man. It's the story of Max, growing up and coming to Liesel's home, and it's painted over white-painted pages of Hitler's Mein Kampf, which you can see through the paint.
Zuzak has shown he's a writer of genius, an artist of words, a poet, a literary marvel. His writing is lyrical, haunting, poetic, profound.
Death is rendered vividly, a lonely, haunted being who is drawn to children, who has had a lot of time to contemplate human nature and wonder at it.
Liesel is very real, a child living a child's life of soccer on the street, stolen pleasures, sudden passions and a full heart while around her bombs drop, maimed veterans hang themselves, bereaved parents move like ghosts, Gestapo take children away and the dirty skeletons of living Jews are paraded through the town.
The book is never morbid, a lively humour dances through the pages, and the richness of the characters' hearts cannot fail to lift you up.
Liesel and Max, the Jew her family protects, would be the only main characters that survive the war.
Nevertheless, the book has been challenged several times because of what has been claimed as its surreal concepts, heavy plots, children's perspectives on the German army, and its war setting.
It has been recommended as "a dystopian novel that feels all too close to real". On the other hand it has been banned and challenged for profanity and for "vulgarity and sexual overtones".
The Book Thief's ending is very sad with Liesel losing almost everyone she cared about in Molching. It serves to show how unpredictable and often terrifying life was during the Second World War when everything was uncertain and people could die at any time.