Buy this book

Anna Leach
posted 20 March 2007

The narrator of The Book Thief is Death. Death has found a book written in 1943 by a young German girl called Liesel; it is autobiographical, and recounts her experiences living with foster parents in a town near Munich. In the prologue, her real parents - 'Kommuniste' - are taken away, and her little brother dies. Liesel's book is called 'The Book Thief' and Death is reading it to us.

On the first page, Death introduces himself and talks about death: 'I am in all truthfulness trying to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. Please, trust me. I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the As. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.'

Markus Zusak's Death is an odd prose stylist: mixing a kind of calculated clumsiness with fresh surprising turns of phrase. Zusak previously wrote children's literature and there is a flavour, in this narratorial voice, of Zusak's fellow 'young adult' author Terry Pratchett, the runaway publishing success. Just when there's a break in the main narrative, and we're looking for the sublime or the tragic, we get this the jokey, affected verbose conversationalist, a character very much from children's literature. Pratchett has his own characterisation of Death - a lugubrious 'skeleton doing his job' called Mort, hounded by jokes about scythes - Zusak's Death has more in common with him than with the black void or endless sleep.

So, occasionally there will be something like this passage, when Death fills us in on background historical detail. Here he talks about the year 1942 and its resultant carnage: 'Forget the scythe, God damn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a holiday.' (p329) or, faced with the homeless clamouring after him: 'At times I wish I could say something like "Don't you see I've already got enough on my plate?" But I never do. I complain internally as I go about my work and some years, the souls and bodies don't add up, they multiply.' (p330)

Out of context, this could almost be 'Genocide for Schoolchildren'. We're used to hearing about the Second World War in the hushed reverent tones of history books, or as the raw genuine voice of a survivor narrative. So the grumbly sub-comic voice of this non-existent person is strange and perhaps even patronising. Death's own word for what he does is 'distraction'. 'My one saving grace is distraction. It keeps me sane,' he tells us (p5). So, perhaps we should consider it as distraction.

Death and, for the Western World, the Holocaust in particular, is a negation of words: silent and indescribable. George Steiner claimed that after the Holocaust there could be no more tragedy: it was an event so awful that it killed the possibility for expression. So for Zusak to give a voice, especially such a distinctive and whimsical voice, to the quintessential concept of nothingness, is essentially a nice surprise.

The book's story is a brutal one of loss and pain, as people that Liesel loves are threatened and die. However, in The Book Thief this human narrative is countered by a redemptive sub-story in which words grow in strength and meaning, to the extent where they become a compensation for the sufferings of the battered central character. Maybe it's a postmodern idea, but there is an expectation today that literature should explore the limitations of language and probe around the failure of words, so it is unusual to find a bold claim for their strength.

Liesel steals books as a means of recouping her losses. And then she writes her own book. Each of the ten parts to Liesel's story is named after one of the books she has read. Words protect her and structure her own story. And that is important for Zusak, who said in an interview with the website Bookpage, 'We are our stories.'

Perhaps Death performs a similar function in relation to us. As our narrator he wraps his asides and chatty introductions and 'helpful' interjections around the painful narrative so that he doesn't just distract himself, he also distracts us. He distracts us from a history we know all too well, as tales of Nazi Germany are quintessential myths of the Western World's twentieth century. And this distraction is a kindness because it is a form of protection.

In a few pages at the centre of the book, Max, a Jew on the run, makes a book for Liesel. There's no paper so he makes the book by taking pages of Mein Kampf and painting over them with white paint, then paints over the white paint with his new story. Attractively reproduced as illustrations in Zusak's book, we see Max's words and paintings, but we can also make out the words of Hitler's tract, in English, lying underneath but only partly effaced. Like the effect of this over-painting, Death's story overlays this historical background we know so well. It covers it up, spares us from the worst of it, and transforms it into something else.

Similarly, Liesel's foster father, Hans Hubermann, a painter by trade, paints over a racist slur on the house of his Jewish friend. The covering up is brave and significant. The painted-over abuse is a 'nothing' or blankness that has a strong positive value.

Death doesn't need to describe the gas chambers of Auschwitz to us in detail, we know what words can tell us about them. So the oblique partial reference is enough, we can see the words we know underneath Death's words:

For me the sky was the colour of Jews.
When the bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. Their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, and their spirits came towards me, up into my arms. We climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. (p272)

In a book about the power of words and a child learning to read, this sort of overlaying is akin to an accretion of meaning. When Hans teaches Liesel to read he paints words on the basement wall and then paints them over with new words as she goes on. In one sense, they are effaced, in another they build up, layer upon layer.

Overlaying is a stylistic device for Zusak as well. Certain images recur: so the same thing, at different stages of the book, comes to mean more and different things. Death tells us what happens at the end of The Book Thief several times, but the third and final time he tells it to us, it is much more powerful than at the beginning. Hans Huberman gives some bread to a Jew being marched through the town centre on his way to Dachau; later, Liesel and her friend Rudy give bread to another parade of Jews bound for the death camp. Rudy, Liesel's best friend and neighbour is introduced to us with an anecdote from his childhood where he blacks his face up and ran laps around the village green pretending to be Jesse Owens, the black American athlete who won four gold medals at Hitler's 1936 Olympics. Later, Rudy is forced to lie face down in manure by a sadistic Hitler Youth commander, then, coated in shit, to run punishment laps for arguing with the commander. Later again, Rudy runs in the Hitler Youth races and wins medals. Even on the simple level of description, there are elements of this overlaying: clouds on several occasions have dark beating hearts, and regularly people's eyes are described as being like coffee stains. This sort of almost Homeric repetition is a little like someone learning through repeating, and, of course, is partly what makes The Book Thief such a long book.

The book can be very intensely moving and beautiful, best when it is spare, as it is in the fleeting descriptions of the concentration camps. Are words really that important? Zusak mentions how important words were to the Nazi regime; true, of course, but it wasn't simply Mein Kampf and propaganda that brought the Nazis to power.

In a story in which we know from the prologue that most of the main characters die, that made me cry and made me scared. It seems wrong to claim the book is too gentle, but that's how I feel about it. The faith in language is perhaps what soothes over the harsh edges in the realities it describes. 'We are our stories' Zusak said, boldly, something which should force us to revaluate the fictions, individual and mass-produced, that we use to define ourselves now. But, part of me says, we are also more than our stories: we make them, we find them inadequate, we choose other ones.

Maybe Zusak, with his belief in the power of words, is the start of a move away from the postmodern obsession with deficiencies and gaps and the lack of faith in fiction, towards an assertion of the self-sufficiency of imaginative things to be in their own right. It is hard to tell whether this is something new or just convincing nostalgia, though reviewers have seen it as 'audacious' and 'ambitious'.

An interesting illustration of Markus Zusak's belief in books as precious objects comes in the simple physical presence of The Book Thief - a book that is proudly bookish in a comforting way. With illustrations, ten parts, named chapters, indentations, curlicues, and built-in chapter synopses that Dickens would been proud of, The Book Thief is a glory of publishing paraphernalia. Add to this a faux-weathered dust jacket and its chunky size, this book has an emphatic physical presence. A statement today where most of the words we read flash up on screens or come off cheap, disposable, easy to handle newspages or magazines. At a time where novels often pretend to be diaries or journalism or just 'real', maybe this is part of the return of solidity and self-assurance to the contemporary novel.