The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.
Why read it
Death has seen a lot of dying — it's 1939 Germany, business is good — but keeps being distracted by a girl who steals books: from a gravedigger, from a bonfire, from the mayor's library. He decides to tell you her story, and apologizes in advance for how it ends.
Liesel Meminger arrives on Himmel Street with a stolen gravedigger's manual and nightmares about her dead brother. Her foster father teaches her to read in a freezing basement; the same basement later hides Max, a Jewish boxer who writes her stories over painted-out pages of Mein Kampf. Zusak's subject is words themselves — the Führer's power came from them, and Liesel steals it back one book at a time.
Zusak, an Australian novelist, grew up on his German mother's and Austrian father's kitchen-table stories — bombed cities, a boy giving bread to a marched prisoner and being whipped for it — scenes that appear in the book nearly verbatim. Published in 2005 as YA in America and adult fiction elsewhere, it stayed on the NYT list for over 500 weeks.
- 01
Death as narrator
Not sinister, not comic — tired, gentle, and haunted by humans. The device sounds gimmicky and reads as the book's greatest strength; he spoils every death in advance because suspense would be indecent.
- 02
Words as weapon and shelter
From book burnings to Max's hand-painted fables, the novel keeps one question in view: the same alphabet produced Nazi propaganda and Liesel's salvation.
- 03
The ordinary decency of Himmel Street
An accordion-playing foster father, a foul-mouthed foster mother whose love wears a disguise, a lemon-haired boy who wants a kiss — resistance rendered at the scale of a household.
- 04
The colors of the sky
Death collects sky-colors at each soul — the book's strange, painterly signature, teaching readers to see beauty as a discipline against horror.
Max paints over pages of Mein Kampf and writes The Standover Man for Liesel across them — the book's thesis made physical: kindness written literally on top of hate.
When bombs fall on Himmel Street, the neighbors shelter in a basement while Liesel reads aloud to keep the fear out — a girl holding a street together with a stolen book.
