StoryreaderThe Book Thief
May 5th 2008 05:04
I am not a person who cries a lot over fictional things. There are people who cry when watching movies, or TV shows, or emotional books. I don’t. Unless there’s really sad music playing- I’m a bit of a sucker then. Play me Mozart’s Requiem and I’ll break down over anything you like. But in general, sad things that are fictional don’t affect me too deeply. With books, especially, when I read up to a part that seems like it will be sad, my imagination shuts itself off. “This is just a fictional book,” I tell myself, “words in ink, on paper. If you close it, all the world is well again.”
Only two books in recent memory have made me cry. One is a picture book of Baboushka, a traditional Russian folktale. There is something so poignant about the woman who lost her child searching for Baby Jesus, that I get all teary, every time. The other book I have cried over is Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I sat at my desk and bawled for ages reading that, it was so strangely out of character that I didn’t know where to put myself.
The Book Thief is set in Germany during WWII, so you know from the start that it’s going to be tragic, and I’m not giving anything away to say that there are quite a lot of deaths. It is told from the point of view of two characters- Liesel, an essentially orphaned little girl living with a new foster family in a small German town, and Death, who is surprisingly emotional.
Almost anything you read or see or hear about WWII will be heart-wrenching, but that is not the only reason why this book is sad. And it is not just because beloved characters die in the book that I cried, though that was the catalyst. The Book Thief is so very beautifully written, that it gets into your soul, and as the novel moves along to the inevitable tragic conclusions, it reaches you inside- away from your brain processing the words.
Liesel is a little girl, and despite the tragedies she has already suffered in her life, and the terrible period she grows up in, and so a lot of the story is concerned with the little things that make up and colour childhood. There is her relationship with her foster parents, school, games of football in the street, the neighbour boy who becomes her new best friend, lollies, apples, her foster father’s accordion music, and an obsession with books. The reality of the war comes through as air raids, and conscription of soldiers, and the persecution of the Jewish community, and Liesel sees all this with the confused and sad eyes of an innocent child trying to understand the madness, which makes it all the more despicable and tragic.
A devise is used by Zusak, which is to intersperse the overall narrative of Liesel’s experiences with little comments made by Death, facts which he tells us, in boxes in the middle of the page. Death talks about colours- the colour of a day, the colour of a soul. Death looks up at the sky, because it is too difficult to look at Earth. And he is so busy during the war. Death is an very emotional character in this book- not the guy in a black cape who just comes to collect you when your time is up- he is removed from the madness of human existence and sees it, therefore, more clearly. The horror it creates, the tragedy. He feels it more than many humans do.
The sweetness and the sadness of Liesel’s experience, and Death’s observations, combine in Zusak’s beautiful, poetic, and at the same time very simple writing style, which draws beautiful, terrible and sorrowful pictures of life. It is an amazing book, and I would recommend it. But have the tissues by your side as you read it.
Only two books in recent memory have made me cry. One is a picture book of Baboushka, a traditional Russian folktale. There is something so poignant about the woman who lost her child searching for Baby Jesus, that I get all teary, every time. The other book I have cried over is Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I sat at my desk and bawled for ages reading that, it was so strangely out of character that I didn’t know where to put myself.
The Book Thief is set in Germany during WWII, so you know from the start that it’s going to be tragic, and I’m not giving anything away to say that there are quite a lot of deaths. It is told from the point of view of two characters- Liesel, an essentially orphaned little girl living with a new foster family in a small German town, and Death, who is surprisingly emotional.
Almost anything you read or see or hear about WWII will be heart-wrenching, but that is not the only reason why this book is sad. And it is not just because beloved characters die in the book that I cried, though that was the catalyst. The Book Thief is so very beautifully written, that it gets into your soul, and as the novel moves along to the inevitable tragic conclusions, it reaches you inside- away from your brain processing the words.
Liesel is a little girl, and despite the tragedies she has already suffered in her life, and the terrible period she grows up in, and so a lot of the story is concerned with the little things that make up and colour childhood. There is her relationship with her foster parents, school, games of football in the street, the neighbour boy who becomes her new best friend, lollies, apples, her foster father’s accordion music, and an obsession with books. The reality of the war comes through as air raids, and conscription of soldiers, and the persecution of the Jewish community, and Liesel sees all this with the confused and sad eyes of an innocent child trying to understand the madness, which makes it all the more despicable and tragic.
A devise is used by Zusak, which is to intersperse the overall narrative of Liesel’s experiences with little comments made by Death, facts which he tells us, in boxes in the middle of the page. Death talks about colours- the colour of a day, the colour of a soul. Death looks up at the sky, because it is too difficult to look at Earth. And he is so busy during the war. Death is an very emotional character in this book- not the guy in a black cape who just comes to collect you when your time is up- he is removed from the madness of human existence and sees it, therefore, more clearly. The horror it creates, the tragedy. He feels it more than many humans do.
The sweetness and the sadness of Liesel’s experience, and Death’s observations, combine in Zusak’s beautiful, poetic, and at the same time very simple writing style, which draws beautiful, terrible and sorrowful pictures of life. It is an amazing book, and I would recommend it. But have the tissues by your side as you read it.
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