Book Review: The Book Thief

 

Book Review: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 

Goodreads Description: It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

My Review: There will be mild spoilers for Max's arc in this review. 

I have... many conflicting feelings about this book. The one I can't shake is this work is problematic AS HELL. It reminds me of the politically correct mentality that was in its relative infancy in the mid 2000s, when our understanding of feminism was 'girl power' marketed by men, when allyship was enveloped by white saviour mentalities, when minorities were fetishized for their pain and their stories commodified by privileged folk. 

I mean, we still have all that going on, but at least we're somewhat more aware of it happening these days.

Before we dig our digits in the dirt, let's take a walk on the brighter side and focus on the book's positives. The Book Thief's use of language is gorgeous and evocative, its diction thick with richness and flavour that oozes off the page. Death's preoccupation with colour lends an extra edge to emotional scenes as colour is used as metaphor for individuals and feelings, as well as pathetic fallacy. Because of this, the colour descriptions infuse deep emotionality into the mundane, which reinforces the hollowness of experiencing an apocalyptic moment in history while you still have to buy milk and go to work. Zusak also uses creative verbs and descriptors to imbue life into his scenes, from "the sound of the turning page carved them in half" to "the conversation of bullets." While some of his descriptions  could be considered flowery, it's kept to a minimum so it doesn't drag down the pacing. A lot of careful thought was placed into the use of words throughout, both as a theme and a practical application. 

I wish the book's beautiful language could carry it alone, yet some of that early 00s thinking held it back from what it could have been. As my creative writing teacher would say, death is a source of instant drama that immediately cranks up the tension and intensity of the story, and when your novel is narrated by Death himself, taking place in one of the most genocidal periods in modern history, you're responsible for depicting the nuance of all that drama. Zusak juggles a boatload of suffering, death, grief, hope, and resiliency in The Book Thief, but centers the narrative around the day-to-day life of the Germans. By focusing on the German perspective, Zusak inserts a lot of domestic normalcy that readers can relate to, and contrasts it against the most dramatic and harrowing events in modern memory. 

I understand that focusing specifically on the Jewish experience -- hiding, life in the ghettos, or surviving concentration camps-- would make it harder for average readers to relate. I also understand the appeal to feature a story about the Germans who resisted, as that's a narrative with a lot of potential that isn't usually addressed when talking about WW2. The problem comes in when understanding that the story of the Holocaust, which this and most WW2 stories center back on, is a Jewish story to tell. Jews were dehumanized and their stories were de-emphasized so much that it took decades to re-center the narrative back onto the Jewish experience. At the time this book was written, white saviour mentality was still ripe in mainstream culture i.e., white people pleading the case for what black Africans needed, Indigenous history taught by and through the perspective of white people, etc. The Book Thief manages the major missteps of any white saviour narrative: focusing the story away from the marginalized minority and onto the privileged majority, while also objectifying the minority characters and fetishizing their pain in order to prop up the virtues of the privileged group. While I think a story that looks at the Germans who resisted Nazi ideology can be good, that's not what this book is about. It's about Max's suffering and how good Lisel's family is for caring about his well-being, instead of focusing on what a life of resistance would really look like. Where are the narratives about Sophie Scholl and her resistance efforts? Books that seek to tell the stories of Germans who resisted should focus on that experience, and not the suffering of Jews. The closest the Book Thief gets to depicting what it would be like living two lives was the scene where Hans smacks Liesel for speaking out against the Nazis, and yet this scene is undermined by the threat that Max may be discovered if they do not behave like proper Nazis, bringing the focus again back onto Jewish suffering. 

Before starting the book, I knew that Max, a Jewish man, comes to live in Liesel's basement, as it's part of the back cover blurb, but I was surprised how little the story featured his perspective or gave him any opportunities to demonstrate autonomy. While there are some scenes from his perspective when he lives with Lisel's family, they focus on his suffering with brief moments of joy thrown in to enhance the drama of his pain later. He has dreams about boxing Hitler and laments about being a burden, but again these only highlight his helplessness and misery. Even when he eventually leaves Liesel's house, we don't see how he survives on his own - instead we are left in the dark until it's revealed he was picked up by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. He becomes a lamp in the narrative after he leaves the house, as once Liesel sees him marching with Jewish prisoners through the city to the concentration camp, he's merely an object for her to demonstrate her virtue around. There were plenty of opportunities to give him some autonomy over his circumstance - show his wit, resilience, and ingenuity as he's surviving on his own - and it might have mitigated some of the narrative's exploitative feel. I understand this may have taken away from the day-to-day mundane perspective that Zusak was going for, to which I will argue: then Max should have been removed from the story. At the very least, it may have lessened the blow since seeing Max the Sympathy Lamp up close only highlighted how the narrative sidelined Jewish voices in a story about a major event in Jewish history. 

It's been a couple weeks between finishing the book and writing this review, and in that time my feelings on the book have only soured. Despite its critical acclaim, the book's attempts at allyship have aged considerably in the 17 years since it was published. Instead of diving into the psychology and real experience of Germans resisting Nazi rule, Zusak took the lazy way and focused on the suffering of a marginalized group to squeeze out easy drama for his narrative. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. Sideling Jewish voices in a Holocaust narrative? Bold move, Captain.