Death and Books: A Review on Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief"
Thus begins The Book Thief, a book narrated by Death as he tells the story of an illiterate, headstrong, book-thieving German child growing up in the Hitler Youth during World War II. Sound like a book categorized for young adults? Absolutely not. And this is the first point I’d like to bring up about Markus Zusak’s book: in no way does it conform to genre, age group or market trends. The book is categorized for young adults (ages 13-18) but the main character is 10 years-old at the beginning of the story and the majority of the characters are adults. It is narrated from the chilling, blunt perspective of Death as he witnesses the destruction of Germany and the lives of a very small and seemingly insignificant people living in the midst of the war. Sounds pretty bizarre, and you wonder, “How could you ever recommend this to anyone?” And yet The Book Thief stands today as probably the best and most refreshing modern young adult book I have read.
It's nearly impossible to know how to present The Book Thief to people. It is about so many things: life, death, books, friendship, war, love, hate...It's hard to know where to begin.
"Well, it's narrated by Death," you tell people first off, and immediately nobody wants to read it. But really, a more accurate description would be that The Book Thief centers around the idea of humanity as seen through Death's eyes: a perspective that Markus Zusak handles with incredible beauty and honesty. The Deal with Death
The book is narrated by Death. This should be really creepy and morbid, especially because the book is set during WWII, which was this massive, macabre festival of Death: something in which he should delight. In Markus Zusak’s original drafts of The Book Thief, it was. Death apparently said “extremely creepy things" and "delighted in the souls he was picking up.” Which, of course, did not work in the long-run. After abandoning this tack for awhile, Zusak returned to Death’s perspective again and found a vastly different voice. In The Book Thief, Death is more afraid of humans than humans are of him. Their lives are elusive and unsearchable, and Death is drawn to their individual stories—which is how he becomes so interested in the life of Liesel Meminger. The final line of the story speaks so well to this mentality, as Death confesses that he is “haunted by humans.” He is astounded by the beauty and the terror of humanity, especially as magnified by the war. The emphasis on the value of every human life is surprisingly Christian, and even more so is Zusak’s outlook on death. He takes a terrifying, bloody, hateful time period of human history and seeks to find the small points of beauty hidden in the lives of these people. And I won’t lie: a lot of people die in this book because—hey—it’s narrated by Death. But in the end, this is not portrayed as a depressing, terrible thing. Those who have lived their lives unselfishly are not afraid of Death. Rather, it is those who are left behind that suffer the most until it, too, is their time to go. Zusak eludes indirectly to the fact that there is something greater beyond this world.
Why Read It? So, Death aside, what makes this book so good? Mostly, I think it’s the characters. Zusak has a gift for forming unique characters that are true to life and lovable despite their flaws. We have Liesel Meminger herself, who has the ability to bring surprising light into people’s lives and to love them wherever they are—a Christ-like sort of love. However, she is also strong-willed, a liar and a thief. The characters who surround Liesel throughout the book are equally complex: Hans and Rosa Huberman, her German foster parents who open their home to a Jew; Rudy Steiner, her best friend who is a soccer-enthusiast and devotee of the black Olympic runner Jesse Owens; Max Vandenburg, the Jew who the Hubermans hide in their basement; and the mayor of Molching’s wife, who feeds Liesel’s longing for books (both borrowed and stolen). Here we have real people who are enduring very real horrors, but never do they fall into despair; rather, they seek to find joy in the small moments of life, in the few glimpses of the sun that they receive through the clouds of war. Even more, Zusak is a master of manipulating words to create images. A lot of people have complained that Zusak’s writing was difficult to follow, especially with Death as the narrator. On the contrary, once readers find their way through the first three chapters or so, the words do come very naturally. Zusak's style is sophisticated, far more so than the vast majority of young adult literature out there today. The voice of the story, rich with metaphor and imagery and plays on words, is as much a part of the book as the characters are. Why It’s Categorized as Young Adult For one thing, the book is set in WWII Germany, and I wouldn’t want my nine-year-old brother reading about the graphic but very real horrors of the war. None of Zusak’s imagery is grotesque, but he does not shy away from making us feel very deeply the terror of air raids, the concentration camps and the annihilation of Jews and Christians. There is also a lot of cursing, mainly on the part of Rosa Huberman. Luckily, most of it is in German. Unluckily, there are usually translations. Liesel is also called a “slut” and “whore” wrongfully at one point in the book by a crazy beggar and the leader of a local gang of starving children. In the final fourth of the book, there is a scene where Rudy is undergoing a physical inspection for a special officer training program for young German males. He has to remove his clothes for the inspection, which is humiliating. Later, he describes the episode to Liesel in confidence, which is disconcerting to her because she cannot forget that image. Not directly related to the age categorization, but still a possible point of concern, is the issue of Liesel stealing books. Rather than being malicious, Liesel's book-thieving habits are used to demonstrate her longing for a world beyond her own and the power of words in her life. Hans Huberman sits with her at night and teachers her, page by page, to read as their relationship develops. Liesel ends up befriending the mayor’s wife whose library she has been breaking into repeatedly (we later discover that the woman was aware of this the entire time). Words are powerful, and we see them at work in Liesel's life through the course of the story.
This is one of those books that every young adult should read, if anything because it looks so deeply into the frailty of the human condition and defies what the world often tries to tell us: that death is something to fear. Rather, Death is afraid of humans, “haunted” by them, and he cannot fathom how such a race could be so beautiful and so ugly at the same time.
War is complicated and terrifying, and many authors have attempted to convey that reality to young readers...or even to dampen its horrors. Markus Zusak really takes a deeper look into humanity, however, and comes down to the level of ordinary people struggling to live in a very frightening and difficult world...and how these ordinary people, through love and perseverance, become extraordinary even through the eyes of Death.