A few months ago, it seemed like everyone around me – both in the real world and online – was talking about Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. There was an incredible, raving buzz about the book that I just couldn’t ignore. When my sister was here in November, she found the book marked way, way down at the half-price bookstore and picked it up. Yay, I thought! She can knock it out and then I can read it. She started it that very day – and gave up on it before the week was out.
Maybe I should have been discouraged, but I wasn’t. My sister and I, we are like a pretty, pretty Venn diagram. We are distinctly unique (and have I mentioned pretty?) circles with a small portion of our tastes overlapping. Depending on the subject – men, books, music, friends, jokes, movies – our common area grows or shrinks. I figured The Book Thief was one of those finds that just didn’t fit into the bookshelf in our common area. I meh-ed to myself and went on my way.
Until just before the holidays when I picked up the book and started reading. Then I thought that we had found the rare book that neither one of us liked. Book Thief starts off as such a slow, unlikable read. The characters are unfamiliar and vaguely like shards of glass – I was afraid to pick them up and try to fit them together because they seemed so pointed and unfriendly. In fact, I was about 100 pages in – at the soccer match between Liesel and Rudy – when I emailed Mrs. E. in a fit of exasperation. Does it get any better? I asked her. You see, I was pretty sure that Mrs. E was one of the people I had heard talking about the book. Only, it turned out that she wasn’t. She hadn’t read it. Oops.
Thankfully I hadn’t given anything away. Even better, the book picked up. The pace got better, the characters…well, okay, the characters will still acting like stubborn, obstinate creatures who refused to be loved. Vignette by vignette, Liesel became sorta likable at times. And that kid Rudy she chummed with – he was okay. Her Papa becomes more endearing as you watch his relationship with Liesel grow. Funnily enough, as human connections were made between the shards of glass, flashes of brilliance started peeking through. And I found that as the story progressed, as the inevitable became even more so, I realized I cared about the story and the people populating it. It was never a charming or an easily likable story. I don’t know that I’ll read it again. But I ached at the ending even when Death (our narrator) warned me in advance what was going to happen. Maybe I ached even more because I knew.
I never thought that I would recommend this book to anyone. I never thought I would care about the characters. Once I figured out the ending, I didn’t think I’d even finish the last sixty or so pages. But the last quarter of the book blew me away. I contemplated adding Rudy or Papa to my list of most intriguing male characters. I read some of the most tender passages of literature I’ve ever read. Seeing human life analyzed through Death’s eyes – something that happened more often and more poignantly towards the end of the story – was so moving that I found it hard to stop thinking about The Book Thief. It is such a haunting, beautiful story nominally about the people who live in a small German town during the World War II, but really about loss and how the human spirit adapts. You have to really want to like this book, but if you can tough it out – if you can have faith in little Liesel until she makes that connection with Rudy – it’s worth it.
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