The Book Thief

It pains me when I see magnificent books, works of art like this, being sold for three quid in Tesco. Every so often a book comes out that has a weight about it, a scope that is so huge that you feel you need to put it on a shelf of its own – such a book is The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak.



The novel tells the story of Liesel, a nine year old girl, living with foster parents after her mother is taken away to a concentration camp. Later the same family hide a young, Jewish man risking terrible punishment should they be caught. Liesel makes sense of her life and escapes through reading. She also reads to other when they are in an air-raid shelter. A non-existent supply of books means that she resorts to stealing them when she can, hence the title of the book.

The novel’s ‘angle’ is that the narrator is Death. It’s divided into bite-sized chunks sometimes witty, chatty and sometimes tragic. Suddenly, in the middle of the text, a section in bold font and with a decorated heading pops up as if on the screen in a silent movie. Through these headings significant moments and situations are emphasised, and we never forget that Death is an omniscient narrator.

The characters are so beautifully drawn that your heart aches for them. Liesel’s adopted father, her boyfriend Rudi who worships the athlete Jesse Owens and the Jewish teenager they later hide in their cellar are so real that a whole other perspective is thrown into this ever-changing tale of the plight of the Jews in the war. Here you hear about the Germans who didn’t condone, the little Schindlers if you will, who had to make their protests small and subtle or lose their lives. The teenager in hiding, Max, white washes over the pages of Mein Kamf so that he has clean pages to write and illustrate a book for Liesel. The symbolism is obvious and very beautiful and I cried reading this part of the book in a way that I don’t recall having done since reading books as a child.

Death describes many deaths and how he carries their souls away that reminds us how precious each life is and how keenly each loss is felt.

This is a beautiful, emotional and surprisingly uplifting book; through it’s ‘small’ stories it achieves something that ‘great’ art often does, it reminds us that humans are capable of much that is evil and much that is great in equal measures. A tangle and conundrum...