“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”
Author: Markus Zusak
The book thief is one of the many novels by German-Australian author Markus Zusak, who is currently nominated for the Youth Literature Award. It tells the tale of a young girl that lives in a small town close to Munich during the times of the Nazi regime.
The narrator of the story is Death himself, who only reluctantly does his job and knows everything there is about everyone walking the earth’s surface. The book thief, a girl named Liesel Meminger, has to experience a lot of horrors in her life. She witnesses the war and its consequences. However, after she stumbled across a big library her life is filled with beautiful hours of discovering the books. When she then stole her first book, the book thief was born.
The novel is also very dark when you consider the persecution of the Jews depicted in it, but I’m glad to say that you also experience real purity and beauty only a human soul can offer. Human values like compassion and friendship are beautifully showcased in this novel as well. Add in a pinch of sarcasm and you get an intelligent, sophisticated masterpiece. The plot has a childlike undertone that accompanies little Liesel throughout her story. We see the brutal reality, the things we only heard in our high school history lessons, through the innocent eyes of a child.
I really recommend this well-written novel that pretty much covers all aspects of life. What’s that? The title rings a lot of bells? Well, you might have heard of the movie “The Book Thief” produced by Brian Percival, which aired in March 2014. It’s based on the novel and is also very recommendable.
Image Rights: Book Cover http://www.amazon.de/Die-B%C3%BCcherdiebin-Roman-Markus-Zusak/dp/3764502843,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book by Johannes Jansson
