Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

They say that war is death's best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible.

Given my recently rocky relationship with YA novels, I figured that I should revisit some of my old favorites to see if I feel differently about them now. When a local book club decided to read The Book Thief for April, it was a chance to reread something that became a instant favorite when I first encountered it 6 years ago.

Reading this book is a little like listening to someone use a typewriter. Staccato, forceful, unmistakable. If you're in a certain frame of mind, it can propel your imagination off to another time and place. In a different frame of mind, it could simply drive you nuts.

The story is narrated by the character of Death, who sees and describes the world in a deliberately unusual way. What stands out the most is the blurred distinction between the living and the inanimate: people are wooden, metallic, or cardboard, while clouds are clumsy and apologetic. It makes sense, given that Death sees the living and the nonliving as tightly adjacent to each other. It also makes sense given the story's focus on books - inanimate objects that come to life in people's minds. I thought that this aspect of the style was quite clever, but other aspects did not impress me as much.

The writing is rife with one-sentence paragraphs.

It created a certain lumpiness in the prose.

I also sometimes found myself wishing that the dramatic pauses and quirky metaphors had been used a little more sparingly. When they were so densely packed, their weight and uniqueness became a little harder to appreciate.

But I still consider it a pretty excellent book and one that I'm glad to have read a second time. Even if I have become a little more critical of the way it was written, I would still agree with many of my original thoughts about it.

Original review from February 16th, 2009. Five stars.

A beautiful book about friendship and compassion in a place dominated by fear and hatred. Spanning 1939 to 1943 and beyond, it tells the story of Liesel Meminger's life in Nazi Germany with her foster parents, friends, and the Jew hidden in their basement. Death's narration is funny, surreal, and saddening all at once. The characters are wonderfully lifelike, and we see more and more of their complexity as the story goes on.

Zusak definitely takes chances in the way he tells this story. "Spoilers" are deliberately handed out ahead of time. Rather than ruining the surprise, they heighten the inescapable anguish of war. The language used is often surprising, and startlingly beautiful.

One additional thing I appreciated about The Book Thief is the unusual way in which it handles the love of books. Too many books about book lovers take a self-congratulatory tone, making it seem as though we're expected to like the characters simply because they, like us, love reading. Not so with Liesel. She starts out illiterate, and as she learns to read, realizes how language impacts the world, and--of course--steals books, we're made to realize how powerful words can be.


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