Sharp Words

I decided to do something different with this review. I knew that one of my frequent commenters, Ken Armstrong, had read The Book Thief too, and since I was having trouble writing a review but did want to write one, I asked him to collaborate.

By the way, if anyone else wants to collaborate on a book review like this, let me know which book you’d like to have a go at, and I’ll see what can be done! (No Harlequin/Mills & Boon, please, but most other stuff is far game.)

Catherine’s rating:  8 out of 10
Ken’s rating: 7 out of 10

It’s January 1939 in Nazi Germany, eight months before the outbreak of World War Two. Liesel Meminger is travelling to Mölking, a town near Munich, to be fostered by Rosa and Hans Hubberman. During the train journey that she’s making with her mother and younger brother, her brother dies; during his funeral, Liesel steals her first book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook.

The Book Thief tells the story of Liesl over the next five years: her new parents, wardrobe-shaped, bad-tempered Rosa and calm, accordion-playing Hans who teaches her to read her first stolen book; her best friend Rudy; the poverty-stricken life she leads in wartime Germany; and perhaps most importantly, the books she steals and the Jew in the basement and the words he shares with her.

Catherine: Liesel’s story is narrated by Death. It starts with a description of the three times he met her during the years covered by the book; these descriptions contain some interesting imagery and set the tone for the rest of the story, in my opinion. Death also puts in little interjections and ‘captions’, almost as if the reader was watching a film or looking through a photographic record. I found the style to be distracting at first, but as I got more into the story, I forgot to read the notes and explanations from Death.

Ken: Okay! This book was the book of the month at Castlebar Book Club a few months ago and I was quite pleased about that. I liked the look of it, you see. It had a ‘grim reaper’ type guy on the cover and it obviously concerned itself with literature and robbery so this was all good.

The book also comes armed with some of the most effusive review extracts I have ever seen. I hate myself for this but I am a bit of a sucker for glowing reviews inside the cover of a book. It makes me feel somehow… safe.

Anyway, this review/discussion between Catherine and me would doubtless be much more vibrant and incisive if I had absolutely hated the damn book - I didn’t. I quite liked it actually but I did think that all those reviews inside the cover lost the run of themselves a little bit. But that’s marketing for you!

Catherine: I didn’t actually read any reviews before I picked up the book. I was vaguely aware of its name, and it had a big ‘bestseller’ sticker on the cover - and most importantly, it was selling for about £3.50 in Asda. So I thought I’d give it a try. I suppose I was rather taken unawares by the way the story was written once I got started.

Ken: I found the book bloody hard to get into. All this pre-narrative meandering by the ‘Death’ Character did nothing for me at all. As a matter of fact the whole ‘This Story is Narrated by Death’ felt like an afterthought to me. It was a little as if the author had written a fair-old story about Germany and the rise of Nazism and then had decided (or, perhaps, had been told) that some window-dressing was needed on the story. A little something to raise it above the Tin Drum clone it was in danger of becoming. I know, let’s put ‘Death’ as the narrator (he’ll look great on the cover), quick rewrite, Bob’s your Jewish uncle.

I’m being facetious here, of course, but the whole death thing did feel a little tacked-on to me. The story didn’t get going until he finally buggered-off from the opening chapters and then he only kept coming back and sticking his skeletal oar in again, to no great avail.

So that was an annoyance…

But, outside of that, there is really quite a charming story in here. The family which the little girl finds herself enscounced in are well-drawn, believable and odd enough to be quite interesting. The girl’s peers are also nicely-depicted although they seemed to be a little conveniently set-up to reflect the various factions of the time…

Come on Catherine! Stick up for this book a little more than I can.

Catherine: OK, I’ll try! I disagree that ‘This Story is Narrated by Death’ was an after-thought. Well, perhaps it was one after the writer had the initial idea for the story, but I didn’t get the sense that it had been written and then Death tacked on afterwards - although Ken could be right, I suppose.

But in any case, the conceit of Death-as-Narrator didn’t totally work for me. Death starts off as very much part of the story, then takes himself outside it to narrate more from Liesl’s own point-of-view… but keeps coming back in with those captions and headings and interjections in a way that I occasionally found jarring - just as Ken did.

On the whole though, I enjoyed the story. I liked the characters (though I agree with Ken that there’s a convenient set of them to illustrate the time period) and I really liked that the plot itself didn’t take the easy way out with an immediate happy ending; although the ending’s not unhappy, it’s quite a lonely one. Which, in my opinion, is probably ‘truer’ than something fluffier.

And it did have me in tears, which is the mark of a book I’ve become immersed in. After all, it’s a story about the power of words and books and the effect they have on people, and those are things that I feel very strongly about.

Ken: I thought The Book Thief was okay, a little cliched, a little ‘light’ given the subject matter and despite some of the heavy things that happen in it. I think, if you want to read a super book on this subject matter, try The Twins by Tessa De-Loo instead.

The Book Thief will be a movie soon. Now why doesn’t that surprise me?

Catherine: I can’t say it surprises me, either! One thing that did puzzle me about this book was its audience: just who (apart from book groups) is supposed to read it? It was sat on the children’s shelves in Asda, but there’s nothing on my copy that indicates that it’s for children - although in many ways, it does fit in the loose genre of Young Adult in both the subject matter and the simplicity of writing and story-telling.

Ken: That’s funny, the book was on the kid’s shelves in Castle Books too (you know, Castle Books… on Castle Street.) It’s really not a kid’s book. Actually, that reminds me - Holocaust for kids will never be done better than The Boy in Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne. Now there’s a kid’s book that should be on the adult’s shelf.

Here’s the last word (for now) from me. The Book Thief - not the best book ever but a darn good read nonetheless.

Catherine: Since this is my blog, I get to have the real last word though. (And is that Castle Books on Castle Street in Castlebar, Ken?)

I think it’s a book that’s worth reading - and I disagree with Ken that it’s not a children’s book. I know that this book, like The Diary of Anne Frank or I am David, is something I could have read at the age of 10 and enjoyed and understood both the subject material and the emotions involved (but then I was a very precocious reader). That said, if you have read a lot of other stuff on the subject of World War Two and the Holocaust, then you probably would find this book to be a bit too light in both tone and subject.

I haven’t read much on those topics in years (though The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, which interestingly I’ve spotted on the age-independent ’Irish Writers’ shelves in my local library, is now on my to-read list), so for me, The Book Thief worked as a story about that time period. Actually, it worked particularly for me because most WW2 novels I’d read had been from the point of view of either people living in Allied countries or victims of the Nazis, rather than from that of someone just trying to live their life in Nazi Germany.

So in summary: we both liked the book but it had its faults. The story was there, the characters were there, but some of the ‘tricks’ used in the narrative didn’t completely work.