Live Like a Flame

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief, Definitions 2008, 9781862302914, &#163 4.10.

Appropriately for a story set in a small German town during World War II, this is a book narrated by Death. It’s also about books, and defines the title term in two ways: 1. person who steals books 2. young girl saved by words. The young girl is Liesel, who comes to Death’s notice when her brother dies, on which occasion she steals her first book, a manual on gravedigging. Liesel, whose Communist parents are killed in one of Hitler’s pogroms, comes to stay with Rosa and Hans Hubermann, foster parents in Molching, and becomes friends with a boy called Rudy. Brusque, competent and outwardly harsh, Rosa is a foil for Hans. the gentle painter and Liesel’s refuge. But the uneasy security she wins is shattered when Max Vandenburg, a Jew on the run and the son of a man who saved Hans’s life during World War I, comes to hide in their house.

Around Max there hangs a terrible doom, and Liesel soon grows to love him fiercely, for she knows that his life is in her hands. In between battling to save him from illness and the Nazis, Liesel has adventures with Rudy and becomes a book ‘thief’: The mayor’s wife, in whose life lurks some tragedy that the children cannot comprehend, invites the rough, half-wild girl to her house and shows her the library. A window is ostentatiously left open, and Liesel begins to visit the house at night, taking books out, reading them and putting them back. But there is another set of books in her life: a secret set, and these are made by Max both as a kind of thankyou present and as a lifeline to keep his soul afloat as he cowers in the basement under a pile of dust sheets. He has no paper except Hans Huberman’s copy of Mein Kampf, which he paints over with white paint and on it draws his tribute to their friendship. Through the streaky white paint, some of Hitler’s words can be seen, but according to Death they become part of the design, the rationale for why the story had to be told in the first place. Max dreams of fighting Hitler in a boxing ring, while Rudy wants to be Jesse Owens.

I am, as you can see, doing a bad job of telling the story, because this is one of those books that can’t be summarised. Not the least of its remarkable features is the tone, which has something of fable, something of the eighteenth century novel, and something of the modern graphic novel, if mostly without actual pictures. Each of the characters is complex and worthwhile, and the final scene brings everything together in a cataclysm which is also present from the beginning of the story, because after all this is Death speaking, and Death knows everything, including each person’s final fate. Time and causality repeatedly knot around each other, endings intrude in beginnings and vice versa, all told in a stately, archaic, mounrful manner that lends the progression of events the stateliness and dignity of a funeral cortege.

It does the book injustice to baldly state that it revisits the Holocaust through the eyes of children, even though, starkly and beautifully, that is what it does. It also talks about books, about war and hate, and what it means to grow up as a girl, in any time or place. Perhaps that is why the book came out in two versions, one for adults and one for children, with different covers, though apparently without any textual differences. It will be a hard book for a child to read, nevertheless. For instance:

On the ration cards of Nazi Germany there was no listing for punishment, but everybody had to take their turn. For some it was death in a foreign country during the war. For others it was poverty and guilt when the war was over, when six million discoveries were made throughout Europe. Many people must have seentheir punishment coming, but only a small percentage welcomed it. One such person was Hans Hubermann.

You do not help Jews on the street.

Your basement should not be hiding one.

The book focuses sharply on the ordinary Germans of the town of Molching, and their complicitness or otherwise in the Nazi atrocities. One comes away from it with a clearer sense of how lots of ordinary, everyday evils can add up to one big evil, provided someone is doing the adding.  Hans Hubermann’s struggle to keep his soul clean in spite of tremendous pressure from the Nazis is as heart-harrowing and doomed as Gen’s father’s crusade against Japanese war-craziness in Barefoot Gen. From the point of view of Death, as from that of a child, war is incomprehensible. Death and the maiden gaze with equal incomprehension at the bombed remains of Molching and at one corpse trapped in it.

September 22nd, 2008 | Tags: Adolf Hitler, Books, Germany, Nazism, novels, Politics, race, review | Category: Books, Reviews | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL