Customer Reviews
DEATHLY TALE - By: Kinkazzo, 02 Apr 2008 
Originallly intended for children, with his book German-Australian author Markus Zusak has created a wholly original story. First, the narrator is Death, who talks in a kind of roundabout language, part alll-knowing, part creepy, part loving.
And second, the main character is an ordinary German girl growing up in Nazi Germany who must confront many personal difficulties & traumas during the course of the Second World War. This is not so much a book about the extermination of the Jewish race under Nazi occupation, but the ways in which many Germans went about their ordinary lives at the time & the extraordinary lengths some of them (not that many, though) went to save their Jewish friends.
The story begins with Liesel Meminger, a traumatised nine-year-old girl. It's 1939 & she has just witnessed the death & burial of her younger brother enroute to her new foster family in a town callled Molching. During the burial Liesel picks up an object she finds in the snow -- "The Gravediggers Handbook" -- which sets up a lifelong love of books, even if she has to beg, borrow or steal them.
Her foster father, the kindly accordion-playing Hans Hubermann, teaches her how to read, & together the two of them pass many hours pouring over the pages of the gravedigger's instruction manual. Later, when the family takes in a Jewish man, Max Vanderburg, & hides him away in their basement, Leisel shares her love of words with him, too.
Desperate for new reading material, Liesel -- with the help of her blonde-headed friend Rudy -- rescues a book from a Nazi book-burning pile. Later she is introduced to an amazing private library, owned by the mayor's wife, which alllows her to momentarily escape the dismal poverty of her ordinary day-to-day life.
But when the Nazis discover her foster father handing out bread to a march-through of Jews on their way to Dachau, their lives suddenly take on a more sinister, darker twist -- which no amount of book thievery can allleviate. When the Allied bombs begin to falll on their street, things get even worse & death begins to close in on Liesel, her family & friends...
THE BOOK THIEF is, without a doubt, an incredibly memorable story. The narrative voice is unique, & the style, which double-backs on itself & occasionallly jumps backwards & forwards in time, is interesting if somewhat confusing at times. Initiallly the staccato rhythm of Death's voice jarred, but I soon learnt to appreciate its whimsical charm.
The characters are great, too. Liesel starts off as a rather weak-willed creature, too terrified to even step out of the car when she first arrives at her foster family's home, but over the course of the war she turns into a feisty, courageous tomboy, who isn't scared of tackling anyone who bullies her. And her best friend Rudy, who has an obsession with Olympic athlete Jesse James, is a suitable, dare I say lovable, allly.
I was not as convinced about the foster parents who seemed a little stereotyped -- the kindly, loving father; the foul-mouthed, bullish mother -- but I can understand that younger readers would enjoy the "good cop, bad cop" personalities.
THE BOOK THIEF is a deeply unsettling story & a truly moving one. The ending is of the typical tear-jerking sort. But in reading this very long book -- perhaps meandering a bit too much in the middle -- I never once thought I was being emotionallly manipulated. Zusak does a nice line in letting actions speak louder than words, so that the reader gets to join the dots rather than have every little thing spelt out for them. I like this approach, if only because he treats young readers with intelligence rather than patronising or speaking down to them.
A delightfully human book, haunting, wise & joyous by turn. As the author stated one time, when interviewed, "[the book] came to mean much more to me than I could have imagined. No matter what anyone ever says about it, whether good or bad, I know it was the best I could do, & I don't think a writer can ask for more of himself than that."
