The Book Thief: The Power of Books

So many people raved about this book by Markus Zusak that I had to get a copy of it for myself. However, once I did, I put The Book Thief on a shelf under some other books. I wasn't sure I was in the mood to read a book for young adults. However, when I started reading it, I wondered if it really was intended for children. The book's major themes are rather adult in nature: the power of books and reading, love and compassion, brutality, the Holocaust, war, and death. In fact, the narrator of the story is Death, although not a mean and conniving death, but a gentle and sometimes even humorous presence, a "reluctant collector of souls". I've since learned that The Book Thief, published in 2005, was originally published in Australia as a book for adults.

The Book Thief is the story of a young German girl, Liesel Meminger. While traveling to Molching, a small town outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, Liesel's baby brother suddenly dies. In a snowy graveyard Liesel steals her first book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook. At this point, Death, the narrator, becomes intrigued by the girl and starts to tell her story. She's given to foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, for reasons that she does not yet comprehend (her biological mother has been labeled a Kommunist and is taken away). Despite Rosa's obstreperous and frequent swearing, Liesel feels secure and loved by her foster parents. She develops a special bond with her foster father, a gentle soul with silver eyes who patiently helps her learn how to read. Throughout the story her love of reading grows and becomes more significant, and she "picks up" a few more books. Liesel becomes best friends with a boy named Rudy ("with hair the color of lemons"), goes to school, and life is pretty good, although she's still haunted by her brother's death. But soon everything changes for the worse. As Germany prepares for WWII, Jews are threatened and taken away, and the Hubermanns, who oppose this senseless brutality, hide a Jew named Max Vandenburg in their basement. Germany's brutality toward Jewish people, and to those helpful to Jews, is a dominant theme in this book.
Throughout the book, Liesel is drawn in by the power of words and books and reads at every opportunity, sometimes aloud to others. She learns the significance of words--words in her books that help her escape from a bleak life, as well as words which hold the country under the hideous control of Hitler and the Nazi party. Hitler's autobiography and book of political ideology, Mein Kampf, is important in several ways in The Book Thief.
Let me stop now--before I give away too much of this book. The Book Thief is quite original, touching, and beautifully written. It brought to mind two other books I've read about the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi, and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. In 2007, The Book Thief won the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award and the Boeke Prize, and in 2009 it became a bestseller on the NY Times' list of children's books. I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially to adults.
If you've read The Book Thief or have a related thought, please leave a comment. For another review of this book, please visit The Reading Life.

The Reader

Don't let the size of this book fool you. I've just finished the pithy book The Reader (Der Vorleser) by law professor and writer Bernhard Schlink, a haunting story of love and guilt in which the legacy of Nazi crimes unexpectedly and dramatically enters a young man's life. Published in Germany in 1995, and in the U. S. in 1997, it was the first German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list, has been translated into at least 37 languages, and is often read in college courses in Holocaust and German literature. The Reader was made into a movie starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, which I intend to see.

Set in post WWII West Germany in 1958, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg gets sick in the street on his way home from school, and a tram worker takes him to her apartment and helps him get cleaned up. Later, he visits the woman, Hanna Schmitz, to thank her, and is drawn into an intense and strange love affair. Besides the considerable age difference between them--she's old enough to be his mother--their clandestine meetings are unusual in other ways and include a ritual of reading aloud. At her request, Michael reads to Hanna, before they shower and make love. Hanna mysteriously disappears after a misunderstanding, and Michael is overcome with feelings of guilt and loss. Years later, when Michael is studying law at the university, he attends one of the many belated Nazi war crime trials, and is utterly shocked when he recognizes Hanna in the courtroom, on trial with a group of former Auschwitz concentration camp guards. During the proceedings, it becomes evident that Hanna is hiding something which is even more shameful to her than murder, something that might save her from imprisonment. I do not want to spoil this story for you, so I'll refrain from revealing the secret or what happens. (Why not read it for yourself? Or see the movie, which has been nominated for numerous Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actress.) The Reader is an important literary work which illustrates the guilt and shame that the Germans bear for the Holocaust, and the moral divide between the generations, and is unforgettable in its psychological and moral complexity.