The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

The Book Thief – Markus Zusak                             7/10

Narrated by Death, this book details the story of a young girl, Leisel living in a small German town on the outskirts of Munich during the Second World War, the relationships she has with the town folk, her burgeoning love of reading and the major events surrounding her adoptive family harbouring a Jewish man called Max Vandenburg.

This is certainly one of the freshest books I have read in a long time. With the old author’s maxim ‘write about what you know’ the current book market is flooded with tales of suburban angst. This novel however, immediately turns this idea on its head by setting the tale in Nazi Germany, leaving the modern reader to be set up with an instant prejudice.

Using Death as the narrator is also an interesting literary device. He provides a politically neutral voice and is a contemplative character. His musings are often used to break up the story with small injections of thought or episodes that are set in bold text in the middle of the page to highlight them. These short passages reminded me of a kind of literary version of the title screens Quentin Tarantino uses before introducing a new scene in some of his films, which I found to be a unique and interesting style once I had got used to it.

Throughout the book we are given hints at what is coming. The reader is left in an ultimate position of dramatic irony due to the nature of the book being set in the past, during an historic period that still resonates strongly in the mind today. However, this layering of dramatic irony as the narration jumps ahead, then back, adds a seductive quality that lures the reader in.

War produces a set of moral dilemmas and contradictions for humans that the book attempts to address. Was everyone living in Nazi Germany a bad person? Of course not, and the characters of Hans and Rosa Hubermann are inherently good. Rudy Steiner strongly participates at Hitler Youth meetings and yet he has a love for Jesse Owens that directly contradicts that ideology. There are Nazis in the book, but even they aren’t all bad, although the state is presented in an almost Orwellian style as all controlling and fearful. A passage where Hans Hubermann is whipped for giving bread to a passing Jewish man is supposedly taken from Zusak’s own life and is particularly emotive.

It is not without its faults of course. I felt the setting up of Leisel’s life before the arrival of Max Vandenburg is drawn out and at times unnecessary. I would have liked a bit more of the wider context at times as a developing hysteria in the country isn’t really reflected enough for me. Also, the style of Death appears to change throughout the book and I don’t think it’s intentional. He is more flippant at the beginning and his interludes are more frequent, before fading a bit at the end.

Despite these minor things it is a very strong novel. I read that in America it was marketed as a children’s book which surprises me because despite the fact it primarily focuses on the child characters, there are some very strong and moving themes and at times it can be quite dark. That said, there are still scenes of hope and I would recommend this book to anyone.