The Book Thief

The Book Thief is an amazing book. It is really and truly wonderful. It’s one of those books with which I so thoroughly identify and which I so enormously appreciated that I wish that I had written it. If you haven’t read it, go out and buy it or check it out of the library right now! Yes, I do genuinely mean this. And no, I am not engaging in gratuitous hyperbole by evoking all of these fluffy adjectives and trite expressions. I realize that it is a growing trend these days to qualify anything and everything as unbelievable, amazing or incredible to the –nth degree. In this case, however, a state of wonder and amazement is a quite appropriate description of my reaction to this book.

From the Oxford-English Dictionary:
Amazement, noun. 1. gen. Loss of one's wits or self-possession; mental stupefaction; bewilderment, perplexity; 2. spec. Overwhelming fear or apprehension; 3. spec. Overwhelming wonder, extreme astonishment.
Related words: admiration, awe, bewilderment, marvel, wonder, wonderment

Wonder, marvel and admiration are precisely what I felt while reading Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief. This seems fitting, for the author is trying to remind us of the wonder and marvel that so often passes unseen in our daily lives.

The Book Thief is narrated by Death, but Markus Zusak depicts him not as a gloomy, frightening grim reaper-type character. Rather, Death is an acutely sensitive, meticulous observer of humans. He does not seek victims, but simply does his job, collecting souls once their bodies expire and recounting with tender wonderment the circumstances of the event, the opportunities missed, the genuine, unbridled emotions as those close to the deceased (which Death terms “leftover humans” and “the ones who are left behind”) react to their loss. The narrator punctuates the story with brief interventions, offering dictionary definitions in the style of mine above, descriptions of his observations or background information about the characters or the situation. Death seems to crave the experiences of the Living and their glorious vitality; he describes the world in wistful detail, with poignant analogies and vivid colors. Death depicts a scream as “dribbling down the air,” a leaf as “dry and hard, like toasted bread,” darkness “stride[s] forward,” words “fell like injuries from his mouth,” or are “stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on,” sometimes even “like waves, breaking on her back.”


Words are, in fact, at the crux of this story. Words have power: power to harm, power to enchant, power to protect, to facilitate escape or to divert, to record and to affirm one’s thoughts, the very essence of our existence. Hitler, the Fürher (leader) as he is referred to in the book, controlled Nazi Germany with words, labeling its citizens and programming their conceptions of one another. Liesel Meminger, our young orphaned protagonist, has a fascination for words. Her mother, a suspected communist in Nazi Germany, delivers Liesel to a foster family (Hans and Rosa Hubermann) on Himmel Street in Molching, a small town in the outskirts of Munich, but her deep curiosity for books and their stories propels her through this and other tragic events. Death intervenes to describe her foster parents:


***SOME FACTS ABOUT***
HANS HUBERMANN
He loved to smoke.
The main thing he enjoyed about smoking
was the rolling.
He was a painter by trade and played the piano
accordion. This came in handy, especially in winter,
when he could make a little money playing in the pubs
of Molching, like the Knoller.
He had already cheated me in one world war but
would later be put into another (as a perverse
kind of reward), where he would somehow
manage to avoid me again.


***SOME FACTS ABOUT***
ROSA HUBERMANN
She was five feet, one inch tall and wore her
browny gray strands of elastic hair in a bun.
To supplement the Hubermann income, she did
the washing and ironing for five of the wealthier households in Molching.
Her cooking was atrocious.
She possessed the unique ability to aggravate almost anyone she ever met.
But she did love Liesel Meminger.
Her way of showing it just happened to be strange.
It involved bashing her with wooden spoon and words at various intervals.
Words, books and stories are Liesel’s sustenance; learning to read and then, to write, is as life-altering for Liesel as are the political changes in the world around her. Before even acquiring these skills, Liesel is enthralled simply by the material nature of books, a black cover with silver words embossed across the front: The Grave Digger’s Handbook. Liesel picks up the book left behind in the snow by a young boy who had dug her brother’s grave, concealing it from her mother and later hiding it under her mattress in her new foster home and earning her Death’s moniker for her, The Book Thief. It is her papa, Hans Hubermann, who gives her the gift of words by teaching her the alphabet and how its sounds combine to form meanings, sentences and stories. These lessons begin as a cure for Liesel’s nightmares about her brother’s death and develop into a healthy obsession that becomes a cure for the larger ills of her war torn world. Liesel reads to people in order to share this ephemeral joy—she reads to the Jew whom the Hubermann’s are hiding in their basement and who becomes her great friend, she reads to a neighbor who grieves for her dead son, she reads to her friends and their parents who seek shelter from air raids in a basement.

Liesel’s life essentially begins when she learns to read The Grave Digger’s Handbook, a narrative about death. Likewise, Death finds some semblance of life through his narrative about Liesel reading. The Book Thief is a story about Liesel, but it also is a primer of life’s simple joys and the importance of human kindness, a reminder from Death that in life one can find infinite treasures even in the smallest, most unlikely, unexpected or insignificant places, objects, events and people. The world is an open book, a cabinet of curiosities (like the one to the right) in which words allow us to share our wonder.

Someone whose advice I deeply respect told me recently that it is important to find moments to act childlike (though preferably, not childish), in order to rediscover the world through innocent, naïve eyes, as if seeing things for the first time. Liesel’s story can help us to recapture this sensation and to bear in mind that life’s journeys are just as rich and important as the end result. Life is beautiful. Even when bombs are falling, books are being burned and everything seems hopeless. Even then, there is beauty just waiting for someone to notice.

Specimen Days

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham is a beautifully written work. He structures the book into three distinct short stories—“Into the Machine,” “The Children’s Crusade,” and “Like Beauty.” Although these stories may very well stand alone as distinct narratives, they coalesce in such a way that allows Cunningham to label his work a novel (the full title of the book is Specimen Days: A Novel). The stories merge in location (New York), character names and relationships (Catherine and Simon, who are romantically involved and a young deformed boy, Lucas) and the evocation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Each story is set in New York in a distinct time period—“Machine” takes place in the early days of the Industrial Revolution; “Crusade” in present-day NY and “Beauty” 150 years in the future—yet the consistency of characters allows the stories to melt together. In these stories, Cunningham satisfies the reader by hypothesizing various answers to the question “what if?” What if this character had died instead of that one? What if this character could be saved from his own self-destruction? If circumstances were different, would this relationship have worked?

Plot summary from wikipedia:

-The first short story, 'In the Machine,' is a Ghost Story. 'In the Machine' takes place in New York City during the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age.

The principal characters include Lucas (a disfigured young boy), Catherine (a young woman who was to marry Lucas' elder brother) and Simon (Lucas' recently deceased elder brother).

-The second short story, 'The Children's Crusade,' is a Noir Thriller. The story is set in early twenty-first century New York City. The story plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city.

The principle characters include Cat (an African-American woman working in a New York City police department), Simon (Cat's businessman boyfriend) and Luke (a child terrorist).

-The third short story, 'Like Beauty,' is futuristic Science Fiction. The story is set in a New York 150 years in the future. In the story, New York City is overwhelmed with refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.

The principle characters include Simon (an adult male cyborg), Catareen (an adult female alien lizard living as a refugee on earth) and Luke (a homeless boy).

In a book review in New York Magazine, Caleb Cain observes: “This ghost story […] sets in motion themes, images, and characters that are reincarnated in the two compelling tales that follow.” Indeed, Cunningham slightly alters his characters’ names and social status in keeping with their respective societies, all the while exploring the same relationships, albeit it from slightly different angles. “Lucas lives in 1870’s New York, and he fears that the dawning machine age has made Whitman’s wishful thinking about death come horribly true” (NY Magazine review). Lucas, suspicious of the animated machines that are gradually replacing the roles humans once occupied, fears that his dead brother Simon’s soul has been captured by a machine. In the final story comes full circle with the novel’s beginning, for here, the cyborg Simon truly is a soul captured inside of a machine, becoming increasingly human in his affections and affectations.

Throughout the stories, the reader senses the haunting presence of Walt Whitman, in fact the title itself is a Whitman reference. The talismanic evocation of his poems, particularly Song of Myself, first by Lucas, then by Simon suggests that the individual dissolves into a common humanity and world experience. Each story, each life experience is but a specimen of a larger, universal truth. With the progression of the stories, the characters are closer and closer to approaching this truth, culminating in the tender relationship between a cyborg and an alien (strangely, this seems much less weird than it sounds). The following oft-quoted lines illustrate this idea particularly well:

-It is you talking just as much as myself…I act as the tongue of you.

-I am large…I contain multitudes.

-I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

- Nobody really dies. We go on in the grass. We go on in the trees.

-All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Even after a bit of reflection, I can’t say that I completely understand this novel. I would have to reread it several times in order to fully appreciate its complexities. Cunningham is a gifted writer and although I may not have grasped all of Cunningham’s intentions, I truly savored his prose. I found myself thinking about the book often, longing for my evening reading time. The below passage from the first story is particularly beautiful and aptly illustrates the presence of Walt Whitman. Here, Lucas describes the pain of having injured himself in the machine:

After some time, a flower blossomed in Lucas’s mind. He felt it, and unfurling of petals, a transformation from bud to bloom. The pain was there still, but it was not in him anymore. The pain had left him as the spirit leaves the body of the deceased. It had made of itself a curtain, shimmering, as if curtains could be made of glass and the glass were veined with colors and tiny instances of light. The curtain hovered, fragile as glass, around Lucas and Catherine. It encircled them. Pain ran through it in capillaries of blue and green, of softest pink. Where it was most intense, pain produced watery quiverings of illumination, like light on a river. Pain surrounded them, and they were here, inside it.

Lucas didn’t think he slept. He didn’t think he dreamed. He was able, though, to see things he ordinarily saw in dreams. He saw that outside the pain curtain, outside the walls of the room, was the hospital, with its patiently damaged supplicants and its crying man. Outside the hospital was the city, with its houses and factories, its streets where Walt walked, marveling at everything, at smiths sweating over their forges and women strolling under feathered hats, at gulls circling in the sky like dreams the hats were having. Outside the city was the book, which invented what Walt saw and loved, because the book loved Walt and wanted to delight him. Outside the book…was there anything outside the book? Lucas couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw a distance, an immensity that was in the book and outside it. […] (85)

The Book of Lost Things

The Book of Lost Things is a coming-of-age story about childhood dreams, superstitions, insecurities, fears and fantasies. Just as a child might do in his imagination, John Connolly masterfully melds classic fairy tales with original fiction. He convincingly creates for his protagonist a vivid and troubling alternative reality, a land where David goes to escape from his new step-mother and infant half-brother in search of his dead mother, but where he discovers that he himself, not his blended family, is the obstacle to his happiness.

From the author’s official website:

High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the loss of his mother. He is angry and he is alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother he finds that the real world and the fantasy world have begun to meld. The Crooked Man has come, with his mocking smile and his enigmatic words: 'Welcome, your majesty. All hail the new king.'
And as war rages across Europe, David is violently propelled into a land that is both a construct of his imagination yet frighteningly real, a strange reflection of his own world composed of myths and stories, populated by wolves and worse-than-wolves, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a legendary book . . .The Book of Lost Things.

Although this is my first John Connolly novel, I was not surprised to learn that he is a renowned author of mystery/crime novels, several containing paranormal overtones, and that he has also published a collection of short stories steeped in the supernatural. I originally thought that this was a book for children, but the author’s skill at describing some of the gruesome events—a huntress who grafts human torsos onto animal bodies to make the hunt more challenging, a Crooked Man who kidnaps children, harpies and half-human wolves who feed on humans—make this more of a story for adults who wish to rediscover the tales and terrors of their childhood. Imagine your worst nightmares realized, for that is what inhabits this land. With the help of several benevolent characters he meets along the way—the woodsman from Red Riding Hood and other characters inspired by fairy tales and legends—young David must confront numerous obstacles, villains and beasts in order to reach the king, whose Book of Lost Things is said to hold the secret of how to return home. Through his various trials and battles, David not only learns how to fight his opponents effectively, but also how to fight in his own inner turmoil. The reader witnesses both his journey through this magical land and David’s journey to adulthood.

If you are a sucker for good fantasy or fairy tales (and think the Brothers Grimm rather than the more recent Disney remakes), pick this one up. It will not disappoint. From the first page, you will be enthralled by Connolly’s superb writing and convincing, vivid imagination. I was impressed and plan to give his mystery novels (a genre I don't often read) a try.

The House on the Strand

I first encountered Daphne du Maurier as a teenager when my grandmother loaned me her worn copy of Rebecca. I remember being completely enthralled, holding my breath with every turn of the page. Had I not had such high expectations for my reading of The House on the Strand due to my fond memory of Rebecca, I may not have been left quite as unsatisfied. This wasn’t a bad novel, just a bit disappointing. In fact, the premise is interesting. I tend to enjoy plots alternating between the twentieth/twenty-first centuries and the Middle Ages or Renaissance—Michael Crichton’s Timeline, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, The Intelligencer, The Eight, even the not-so-well-written Da Vinci Code, though the last three are not truly time travel books, but rather mysteries solved with clues from the past.

Plot summary from daphnedumaurier.org:

“Dick Young has been lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Magnus Lane, a professor of bio-physics. He has agreed, while he is there, to act as guinea-pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered; and the small bottles which hold it are waiting for him in the laboratory at Kilmarth.
With no idea of what the result will be, he takes the prescribed dose - and without warning finds himself back in the fourteenth century, in this same Cornish countryside. During the following days he takes successive 'trips'. Each lasts only a short time, but always he is back in the same surroundings. Invisible, inaudible, he finds that he is a kind of alter ago of Roger Kylmerth, steward to Sir Henry Champernoune, lord of the manor of Tywardreath. He witnesses intrigue, adultery, murder, feeling himself personally involved.
Are the experiences hallucinatory, a subconscious escape from dissatisfaction with his own marital life? Or has he really traveled back in time? This is the question Dick asks himself.
More and more he grudges the hours spent away from these people of long ago, resentful of the time that must be given to his loving though suspicious wife and to his stepsons, intruders into his secret life. With immense skill, the tension is kept on both levels, and, as Dick grows ever more obsessed by his trips into the past, so the reader begins to share his addiction, and to find that past and present become inextricably, perilously mixed - until the final, stunning climax.”

It was the limited character development that truly frustrated me in this novel. Dick Young seems to me a rather shallow individual. We know very little about him, only that he recently ended a career in editing due to displeasure with his job. Dick is a malcontent whose curiosity for the fourteenth century is piqued simply because it is different from his present—perhaps equally complicated, but more logical to him. He seeks refuge from a nagging wife and two stepsons at his friend’s country estate and his brief forays into the past deepen this estrangement. Since Dick is merely a passive observer of the past and has no interaction with the families whose history he is tracing, these passages of the novel have an artificial quality. We witness along with Dick only isolated events in fourteenth-century Kilmarth and have little opportunity to develop sympathies for these characters. Furthermore, Dick’s interactions with the people in his present hardly earn our compassion, either. He conceals his drug-induced time travel from his wife and this growing obsession becomes his only motivation, causing his family relationships to rapidly deteriorate. Du Maurier is quite successful at depicting the single-mindedness of an addict completely dependent on his drug of choice. I only wish that she could have drawn me into her story in the way that her character was drawn to his vice.

If you are looking for a good time travel book, try Connie Willis or Audrey Niffenegger’s excellent book The Time Traveler’s Wife. And for a satisfying Du Maurier read, pick up one of her more celebrated books. There is a reason this one is obscure.