The Book Thief: Not Your Typical Holocaust Novel

Context: When I was doing a practicum at Mountain Ridge Junior High last fall, one of the teachers I worked with liked to recommend her latest good reads to her students. One of the books she recommended while I was in her classroom was The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. A good friend of mine who shares my love for Young Adult fiction also recommended the book to me, so I decided to put it on my Christmas list. My grandma picked it out after discussing my book list with a bookstore clerk (who highly recommended that she buy the book for me), and so I ended up with my very own copy.

Summary: I’m not altogether sure how to summarize the book best. I think I’ll start by sharing what I saw when I opened to the first page of the rather unconventional novel. The first text in the book looks something like this:

“First the colors.

Then the humans.

That’s usually how I see things.

Or at least, how I try.

* * * HERE IS A SMALL FACT * * *

You are going to die

I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations…Just don’t ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.

* * * REACTION TO THE * * *

AFOREMENTIONED FACT

Does this worry you?

I urge you—don’t be afraid

I’m nothing if not fair.”

I’ve cut some out where I put the ellipsis, but basically that’s it. Interesting effect, huh? The novel tells the story of a girl who finds herself collecting books in the middle of WWII Nazi Germany. You find that you can measure important parts of her life by the books she collects. She is a blonde, blue-eyed German so she’s safe from the fate of most holocaust novel heriones, but her adopted father doesn’t agree with all the Nazi practices. In fact, at one point in the novel they harbor a Jew in their basement. The book includes the theft of a book meant to be burned in one of the infamous Nazi book-burnings, the exploits of a neighborhood boy who idolizes Jesse Owens (not a popular guy with the Nazis…), and the bombing of the little girl’s town. In my opinion, the book doesn’t lend itself well to summary.

Analysis: The most intriguing part of this book for me is the narrator. It takes you a few chapters to figure it out (if you haven’t been informed) that the narrator is death. It’s a very interesting personification. Most authors use an omniscient narrator, a first-person narrator, or at least another character acts as the narrator, but because death is a character in every life, Zusak presumes that death will work well as a narrator. His presumption isn’t always correct. Parts of the book are confusing. Death gives away the end of the story way before the end comes. But in the end you get the feeling that Zusak wanted it to be a little confusing. Holocaust Germany was confusing. So, while the narrator may not work the best as far as telling the story goes, it definitely works the best as far as telling the message of the story, giving the Holocaust atmosphere, and capturing the reader go. He’s taken a fairly set genre—the novel in prose—and blown it to pieces. He breaks almost every rule there is to telling a story, using proper punctuation and grammar, writing in paragraph format, etc. but all that breaking of convention really aides in the story-telling somehow. I can count on one hand the times a book has made me cry. This book made me cry at the end even though I already knew what was going to happen and how it was going to end. The narrator gave away the ending a fourth of the way through the book, and I still cried when I read that ending. Now that is good story-telling!

Educational Context: This is a great text for showing the unconventional things you can do to create effects in writing. Bold letters, asterisks, headings, points of view, order of events, etc. are all elements of the writing in this novel. Marcus Zusak really breaks the norm. I think this is also a good example of how genres are changing. A novel doesn’t have to be page after page of solid paragraphs any more. This could start a good discussion about how media develops.