Much like the Fault in Our Stars, Markus Zusak’s masterpiece and I were thrown together. We encountered each other in a room where he was the only book, and I was badly needing to read. All I knew beforehand was that it had something to do with the Holocaust and that it had an impressive reputation.
Shuffling back to my cousin’s empty room I began to read. I don’t think I was even done the first page before I considered myself captured by it. I give praise to lots of novels. I enjoy lots of stories. I love a million different pieces of literature, however I can say with absolute certainty that this is one of the finest books I have ever read.
This is the sort of book that should have been impossible to write. Much like To Kill a Mockingbird, the premise sounds like it could never work. The trial of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small town in the 1930’s told through the eyes of a six years old girl. A novel about a young girl in Germany during WWII narrated by a constant visiter in her life: death.
The very notion of the novel is incredibly innovative. It stirred something in me. It made me smile. It made me think: here is someone pushing all the buttons. To have the audacity to write from death’s perspective is insane, and yet he does so masterfully. This book is written with the talent of a poet, the heart of a child, and the coldness of his narrater. This is a book to tare you to pieces. I don’t think there could ever be anything sadder.
However at the same time it’s treatment of death is almost humours. It is not inevitable, it is not heart-breaking, in fact if anything it is mundane. It is part of the narrator’s job description, and it is the shade through which the story is told. This alone would make a terrific novel, this idea of death, this poetry of prose, this impossible premises but added to all this is an indescribable loveliness.
Somehow Zusak makes you fall in love with Germany during WWII. He makes you fall in love with a little girl greedily hanging on to the mystic of literacy, and her adoptive father, the sweetest man alive playing an accordion and trading cigarets for books. He makes you fall in love with a constantly hungry boy who only wants a kiss out of life, and a grim woman who curses every other word but has a good heart. He makes you fall in love with a suspicious young man, who dreams of boxing Hitler and takes hours painstakingly illustrating books for a little girl’s pleasure. He makes you fall in love with their necessity, with their hunger, with their want for candy, with their fear of change, and most of all their distance to everything we think and hear about Germany during this time.
This book is a perfect reminder that wars and bombs are completely out of control of normal people. Sometimes (even as a History student) that’s hard to remember.
Honestly, I don’t think I can be objective about this book. I don’t even think I can properly describe how much it affected me. All I can really say is that surprising as it may sound this is the most beautiful book I have ever encountered. I think everyone should read it, at least once.
Beware of the Fandom Girl 