DVDVRSBE: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

[jaedmc]

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Picked by Shane

Read and Reviewed by Suicide King of Spades

 

So, the first thing I did was go and give myself an idea of what this book was all about.  It seems to be recommended for seventh to tenth graders, and at first I wasn't thrilled about getting a young adult novel, but the user reviews on Amazon are, like, overwhelmingly, rapturously positive.  This is apparently the new holy grail of teenage literature.

 

The story is about a German family during World War II.  If you're going to tell a story about the Holocaust, you already have a whole lot of company, which means that it would help if you can bring something original to the table.  Well, this story is narrated by Death, so you can put a check mark in the "originality" box.

 

Death is polite and non-intrusive, a real gentleman.  You get the impression he would say something like "I'm sorry, I don't want to bother you, but you'll be dying now."  It's sort of playing with the notion that we all know we're going to die but, ideally, we talk or think about it as little as possible.  There are these constant asides throughout the book; I downloaded the e-book, so I'm not sure how the formatting works in the original printed work, but here they're bolded and dropped in the middle of the text.  The first one says "HERE IS A SMALL FACT: You are going to die."  The word "small" gets used a lot in those things.  It actually approaches the point of being a bit too twee.  I also noticed quite a few one-sentence paragraphs, I guess as a way of creating gravitas.

 

The family is a couple, Rosa and Hans Hubermann, who have an adopted daughter, Liesel.  The father is a Jewish sympathizer, and he's in a position to help out one particular Jewish man, Max Vandenburg.  One of Liesel's friends is a boy named Rudy, who has a fascination with Jesse Owens, and a crush on Liesel.  There are a bunch of other minor characters too.  The title comes from Liesel's propensity to steal books, mostly from the house of her town's mayor.

 

The one part I liked more than anything else was where Max has a fantasy about a boxing match with Hitler.  That was handled in just about the best way possible.

 

All in all, I wouldn't be swooning over it like all those people on Amazon, but it was good.  It did feel a little like there wasn't enough of a plot.  I guess in a typical story, you'd have a crisis that needs to be overcome, but here the crisis is the Second World War and this is pretty much a random German family, so there's nothing they can do.  The effect is like they set up all these characters and then just sweep across and erase it all at the end (you knew this wasn't going to have a perfect happy ending, right?).  But it does make you think about how many people were in that exact situation.  No one in the story is at all consequential in terms of how the war played out, but there were so many people just like them.

[EVA]

A Holocaust story narrated by Death and it's considered YA? That's fucked up.

[Jingus]

It's amazing what they'll slip into YA these days. Hell no, Ready Player One is NOT targeted at tweenagers. Or Terry Pratchett's last Tiffany Aching book, which included among its main plot points a brutally abusive father who beats his pregnant daughter until she has a miscarriage and then has to run away from a lynch mob.

That being said, The Book Thief sounds p. awesome and I'll probably check it out at some point. At least it's a very different look at the Holocaust, which has had SO damn many books written about it that it's awfully hard to find one with a fresh perspective.

[Shane]

I specifically chose a YA book. I think there's some preconceived notion at what "YA" is and I can assure you...it's not what it was when most of the people on this board (myself included) were teens. Some of the most compelling fiction out there right now can be found on the YA shelf.

At an ALA conference earlier this year, I listened to Jonathan Maberry give a talk about how the only "rule" of YA is to be real. Teens see through bullshit fiction that doesnt relate to their worlds a mile away, and a lot of what I read reflects that to a tee...

[Jingus]

Back on the YA topic: I was recently flabbergasted to learn that my new favorite book, Chuck Palahniuk's Damned is somehow classified Young Adult at my local library.  Uh, did nobody READ this thing?  Or did you just skip, like, half the fucking book?  There's a scene where they kinda recreate the decapitated-cunnilingus scene from Re-Animator, except the chick is a 100-foot tall female demon who just ate the guy's body and the head is literally shoved into her clitoral hood.  Did the library folks just read the book jacket summary, get to the part where "it's about a 13-year-old girl..." and then stop reading and assign it to YA without realizing the sentence ends "...who lives an absolutely miserable life and then dies and goes to hell"?

[Shane]

Probably. When you're copying the cataloging other people have done and aren't paying attention (or don't have the time or knowledge to know better), that stuff happens.

I do a bit of cataloging in my new position and I run into the same thing. I'll occasionally download a record and find that it's shockingly incorrect. Luckily, I do it so little that I have the time to look over things if they don't look right.

[Jingus]

You're a librarian?  I've always wanted to be a librarian.  Seems like the nicest job in the world. The best job I ever had was working at a book store.  But it's hard to break into that business, almost as hard as it is to get into wrestling.  And the existence of Kindle implies that it isn't a growth industry.  

[RIPPA]