Review: The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE


1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier.
Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.

SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION - THIS NOVEL IS NARRATED BY DEATH

It’s a small story, about:
a girl
an accordionist
some fanatical Germans
a Jewish fist fighter
and quite a lot of thievery.

ANOTHER THING YOU SHOULD KNOW - DEATH WILL VISIT THE BOOK THIEF THREE TIMES

So I tried to type a long (ish), well-thought out review to explain why I disliked this book, but then there was a bug and I lost it, so allow me to give you the short version:


1) This book care more about Zusac/Death’s pseudo-philosophical musings and addiction for metaphors of varying literary value than it cares about Liesel Meminger, the title character (despite her having stolen a maximum of five books in her entire life).
Exhibit A: The above summary.
Exhibit B: The obnoxious boxes literally give more weight to the “little fact” and other dictionnary quotes than the narrative itself.
Exhibit C: The book thief is the title of Liesel’s in-verse, first-person autobiography, which she wrote at 14. Markus Zusac decided that book was less interesting than nearly 600 pages of having Death telling us how he viewed that litlle girl.
(Hint: Death does not view her as a person.)


2) In fact, this book doesn’t treat any of its characters like characters/persons. they’re all metaphors, random collections of images, labels. Rosa Huberman is wardrobe-shaped. ‘Papa’ has silver eyes. Rudy Steiner is Jesse Owens/has lemon-colored hair. Isla Hermann is broken, shivering in her bathrobe. Liesel struggles with words.

3) There’s only one Jewish character in this story, and he completely reduced to his status a a Jew–in fact, that’s what he’s called most of the time. The Jew. And on the few occasion where that changes, he’s still not presented as a person, but as an animal–a bird. Aka, yes another metaphor.
Somebody should tell Markus Zusac that Jewish people are people, not metaphors.

4) Some plotless books are compelling. No, really, they exist, and to be fair, The book thief could have been one of those. That is IF Zusac had refrained to spoil the entire ending. Like, seriously, when the main thing compelling people to keep reading is “I wonder how WWII is going to fuck this calm little town and group of people up” you don’t have your narrator barge in halfway through and go “OH BTW THIS IS HOW SUCH AND SUCH AND SUCH ARE GOING TO DIE”


Honestly, this mostly just feels like intellectuall wanking and I’m so freaking done with that… hence, one star.