So I read The Book Thief… Finished it…um… yesterday? Day
before yesterday? Typing hurts my back, and I am grumpy and unbloggy…
Have had a very sore back and a house full of babies (that I
still haven’t properly managed to pick-up after) all week, and I find myself
getting far too much enjoyment out of whingeing about the former. Even though
reading The Book Thief reminds one how little one really has to whinge about.
It’s another book with a back drop of war. Different war of
course. This book is set in Germany between 1939 and 1944, which helps you guess
WHICH war. Our protagonist Liesel Meminger, is nine years old at the beginning
of this story when she is on a train journey with her mother and brother to
Himmel Street, in Molching. Her brother dies on
the train, and her mother is taking her to live with foster parents. She will
never see her mother again. Anyone with even the vaguest knowledge of the
German language knows that ‘Himmel’ means ‘Heaven’; but there’s not a lot of
resemblance between the street and its name, unless you count the part where
everyone dies and possibly goes to Heaven… if there is such a fabled place.
I enjoyed this book a lot. We have all read books; watched
movies about this time in history. This one was different in that Liesel
Meminger is not a Jew, nor did she even really know of any Jews before the events
in the story. She is just an ordinary German girl of no special consequence, so
this book tells a story of what ordinary, not wealthy, or politically minded
German people endured during this time. When you read about/watch movies about
the atrocities committed by the Nazis around this time you wonder (or at least
I do) how it could have been allowed to happen. How an entire nation of people
could be so prejudiced and callous towards another group of people not particularly
different from them. The answer of course is they weren’t… they just weren’t
allowed to say so, or do anything about it, for fear of the same treatment. You
have to protect your own family first, because they were in danger, always.
Never doubt it.
But mostly it’s a book about a little girl, who steals books…
or has them given to her, or writes them in a basement. It’s about how words
save her life, or symbolise the loss of a life, or document a life, give
meaning to a life.
I didn’t think much of the ‘Death as narrator’ literary
device used in the telling of her story, and Death… as someone who professes to
use distraction (Ooh look at the colour of the sky) so as not to have to pay
too close attention to the ones left behind, the ones who survive, good old
Death seems to pay an inordinate amount of attention to young Liesel, and her
loved ones. Could have done well without Death being the teller of stories.
Glad I read it.
Now I’m reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Can quite safely
say that, 25 pages in, I HATE it. Wordy, rambling, circular sentences of
antiquated language about stuff I don’t give two shits about. So look forward
to THAT review OK?
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