Semester II, READING AND REFLECTING ON A TEXT

Paper: EDU 09.2 Curriculum and Resources in Digital Era: English Education 

 THE BOOK THIEF

by, Markus Zusak

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Markus Zusak (born 23 June 1975) is an Australian writer with Austrian and German roots. In 1999, Zusak’s first novel, The Underdog, was published after many initial rejections. It is the first book in a trilogy narrated by Cameron, the youngest child in the working-class Wolfe family. Zusak’s second and third novels received numerous awards and honors, including the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults for Fighting Ruben Wolfe and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction for When Dogs Cry.

Zusak followed the Wolfe brothers’ trilogy with The Messenger in 2002. It is the story of down-and-out teenage cab driver Ed, who receives cryptic messages via playing cards that direct him to help strangers in need.

The Book Thief followed in 2006 and was met with even more critical and popular success. A sympathetically drawn Death narrates the story of orphan Liesel Meminger, who finds friendship and a new family in a small town in Germany during World War II. Zusak received many awards for The Book Thief, including the Michael L. Printz Honor and the Kathleen Mitchell Award (Australia). It was named a Best Book by the School Library Journal and the Young Adult Library Services Association and was the Editors’ Choice in the Kirkus Review and Booklist. Zusak lives in Sydney, Australia, and continues to write fiction.

BACKGROUND

Markus Zusak, the author of The Book Thief, was inspired by an eye-witness account his mother had told him when he was growing up: as Jews were being marched down the street by Nazis, a boy offered a struggling old man a piece of bread. In response, the German soldiers took away the bread and whipped the man and the boy. Zusak saw this as the ultimate symbol of the difference between kindness and cruelty, and it became a repeating theme in his novel.

PLOT

The Book Thief is about a young girl, Liesel, growing up in Germany amidst World War II. Liesel is effectively an orphan. She never knew her father, her mother disappears after delivering her to her new foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann and her younger brother died on the train to Molching where the foster parents live. Throughout the story, Liesel steals many books. At first, she doesn't even know how to read, but she knows that the book is important. Hans notices and teaches her how to make sense of the letters. Death first encounters nine-year-old Liesel when her brother dies and hangs around long enough to watch her steal her first book, The Gravedigger's Handbook, left lying in the snow by her brother's grave.HIMMEL STREET

Her foster parents, Hans and Rosa Herbermann, are poor Germans given a small allowance to take her in. Hans, a tall, quiet man with silver eyes, is a painter (of houses, etc.) and plays the accordion. He teaches Liesel how to read and write. Rosa is gruff and swears a lot but has a big heart, and does laundry for rich people in the town. Liesel becomes best friends with her neighbour Rudy, a boy with "hair the colour of lemons" who idolizes the black Olympic champion sprinter Jesse Owens.

Hans and Rosa are not Jewish, but they do not agree with the Nazi regime and privately fight against it by hiding a Jewish boy, Max, in their basement. Their anti-Nazi sentiments remain a secret until one day Hans helps a Jew who is struggling to keep up with the group as they're being marched to a concentration camp. In response, the soldiers whip both Hans and the man he helped.

Max and Liesel become close friends, and he writes an absolutely beautiful story for her, called The Standover Man, which nearly broke my heart. It's the story of Max, growing up and coming to Liesel's home, and it's painted over white-painted pages of Mein Kampf, which you can see through the paint.

Hans is worried that this incident will draw suspicion to his family and that Max is no longer safe in his basement, so he sends him away. After Max leaves, Liesel is given a book he made her, 'The Word Shaker,' which he wrote about their friendship and a promise that they will be reunited. Hans is then drafted into the German army where he ends up breaking his leg and is sent home to recuperate.

Unfortunately, Max was not able to escape the Nazis, and Liesel sees him being marched through town one day on his way to the concentration camp. As the war continues, Liesel is given a blank notebook to write her story in. She names it 'The Book Thief.'

One day her neighborhood is bombed, and Hans, Rosa, and her friend Rudy are all killed. In the rubble, Liesel leaves her book behind. After the war ends and the Jews are freed, Max goes back to find Liesel, and they are happily reunited.

Death ends the story by telling us about Liesel Meminger's death, how she lived a long life in Sydney with her husband, three children, and many grandchildren. When Death goes to collect her, he sets her down so they can walk together for a while. He shows her The Book Thief and wants to ask her so many questions about humans. He cannot understand them, how they can contain so much lightness and darkness. He doesn't ask these things, though. All he can tell her is that humans haunt him.

With The Book Thief, Markus Zusak has shown he's a writer of genius, an artist of words, a poet, a literary marvel. His writing is lyrical, haunting, poetic, profound. Death is rendered vividly, a lonely, haunted being who is drawn to children, who has had a lot of time to contemplate human nature and wonder at it. Liesel is very real, a child living a child's life of soccer in the street, stolen pleasures, sudden passions and a full heart while around her bombs drop, maimed veterans hang themselves, bereaved parents move like ghosts, Gestapo take children away and the dirty skeletons of Jews are paraded through the town.

Many things save this book from being all-out depressing. It's never morbid, for a start. A lively humour dances through the pages, and the richness of the descriptions as well as the richness of the characters' hearts cannot fail to lift you up. Also, it's great to read such a balanced story, where ordinary Germans - even those who are blond and blue-eyed - are as much at risk of losing their lives, of being persecuted, as the Jews themselves.

This is a lyrical, poignant, heart breaking, soul-shattering story disjointedly told by a nearly-omniscient, fascinated by human narrator – Death. Death has plenty to keep it busy, as the story is set in Nazi Germany during World War II.

“Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.”

And yet he becomes strangely fascinated with one particular human, the titular book thief, a young German girl Liesel Meminger, whose childhood is marked by war, who learns to read and love and treasure books, who has her small rebellions against the force of society, who learns to love and be loved, who has to learn to lose what she loves.  Because the world is baffling, because it is a cruel place, because often it tries to stomp out love and beauty.

The participation of Death as a character and narrator is presented as a matter-of-fact from the start, and Death continues to figure in the plot. Death changes emotionally over the course of the novel, haunted by the humans who have died. And there's a powerful payoff in the Shakespearean ending, when author Markus Zusak wallops the reader again and again with the fates of these people, good and bad, whom the reader has come to care about. These are deeply mined characters acting in response to deeply dramatic circumstances. 

The book is beautifully surreal, with the masterfully written language reflecting the alien, non-understandable, strangely fascinating nature of the narrator - Death. It is the mix of colours and strange metaphors, semi-dictionary entries and frequent strange asides, with skipping time, with complete disregard for spoilers.

Characters list

Death

A metaphysical being, Death serves as the dryly cynical narrator of The Book Thief. Death's duty is to carry away the souls of the recently departed, which it has apparently done for millennia. In its line of work, Death tries to focus on colors as a way of distracting itself from the survivors of those who have died. Liesel's story is one of a handful of survivors' tales that Death remembers; in fact, Death retrieves the actually written autobiography of Liesel's life after the air raid at the end of the novel.

Liesel Meminger

Introduced by Death as "The Book Thief," Liesel is nine at the beginning of the novel when her younger brother dies and she is given up by her mother to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann in the small town of Molching. Liesel is traumatized by her brother's death, but Hans proves to be a calming foster father; with his help, she learns to read and soon finds comfort in the written word.

Hans Hubermann   

Liesel's silver-eyed foster father. An amateur accordion player, Hans is a tall, gentleman with a remarkable amount of integrity and bravery -- Hans' compassion sets a strong example for Liesel, who is soothed by his presence. A skilled house painter by trade, Hans is horrified by the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, and he brings scrutiny to himself by painting over anti-Semitic slurs on Jewish-owned homes and businesses. Hans' impulsive kindness ultimately gets him in trouble, and he is conscripted to serve in a dangerous air raid recovery unit.

Rosa Hubermann

Hans' wife and Liesel's foster mother. A squat woman who makes some money doing laundry for wealthy neighbors, Rosa has a fiery attitude and frequently employs profanity, especially towards those whom she loves.

Max Vandenburg

A 23-year-old Jew hides from the Nazis in the Hubermanns' basement. Max was a fist-fighter growing up, and as a teenager, he resolves not to die without a fight. Max is wracked with anguish and guilt over leaving his family to save himself, but he comes to befriend Liesel as the two share their respective nightmares. Their friendship grows very deep, and Liesel reads to Max every night when he falls comatose. Max makes two books for Liesel, both of which involve thinly-veiled allegories about their friendship and Nazi Germany: an illustrated story called "The Standover Man," and a long book of sketches that includes the short story "The Word Shaker."

Rudy Steiner
Liesel's best friend. One of six Steiner children, Rudy is gallant and impetuous -- he is best known for painting his face black and running around a track imitating Jesse Owens. Rudy is motivated throughout the novel by his love for Liesel.

Conclusion and Analysis

In the Prologue, Death establishes the main events of the story. He identifies the book thief and the moments during which he sees her throughout the course of her life. Death provides glimpses of the story's future but doesn't narrate in detail, something he will do as the novel progresses.

Each of these events coincides with a particular colour that reflects the mood of the moment. Throughout the novel, Death's preoccupation with and study of colours remains a consistent theme. He comments frequently on his inability to understand humans, how they can be so kind and yet still cause so much destruction and suffering; like colours, humans are ever-changing and can also be murky in their behaviour. Along with the mood of the humans, the colours often complement the weather, as well as the tone of the events happening during particular chapters. For example, Death emphasizes the colour white during the snowy scene in "Beside the Railway Line" when Liesel's brother dies, linking the colour back to the weather, thus contributing to the overall setting. Also, Death focuses on the colour black, a colour of mourning and sadness, during the death of the pilot in "The Eclipse," contributing to the scene's stylistic tone. This pattern of having colours, moods, weather, and tone complement each other continues throughout the novel.

REFERENCE

1.       Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. Picador/Pan Macmillan Australia, 2019.

2.       “The Book Thief by Markus Zusak – Review.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Mar. 2014, www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/mar/17/review-the-book-thief-markus-zusak.

3.      “The Book Thief by Markus Zusak – Review.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Mar. 2014, www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/mar/17/review-the-book-thief-markus-zusak.

4.      Google Search, Google, www.google.com/search?q=the%2Bbook%2Bthief&tbm=isch&chips=q%3Athe%2Bbook%2Bthief%2Cg_1%3Aillustration%3Ap0xqEbRfP2M%3D&bih=568&biw=1366&rlz=1C1FHFK_enIN939IN939&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi5gcXEu-jyAhUT5TgGHe_sD8sQ4lYoEXoECAEQMg.