CBR-III #7: Markus Zusak: The Book Thief

The word "bestseller" does not usually make me want to read a book any more desperately. Likewise, the more people recommend a book to me, the more I expect to be, if anything, disappointed. That may not make me a particularly open-minded reader, but sometimes, I give books a try just to prove to myself that I will at least read them before I slag them off.
The Book Thief did not appeal to me at all. The sleeve notes are disjointed, just like the first few pages, and books about books? I recall the hate-fest that was my Firmin review. I'm not one for metafictional, narrated-by-death magical realism novels. But I gave it a go.

The Book Thief is the story of Liesel, a young German girl who grows up with foster parents in a poor suburb of Munich during WWII. She sees her brother die and her mother disappear before the story has even properly begun, and during the course of the novel, she is confronted by all the things that make the 1940s such a desperate time for most of the world. Perpetually hungry, she is forced to steal food, but she longs for one thing even more: Books. Superficially, it's the story of how she acquires a handful of books. But in the small world she inhabits, the big questions that the horror of the Nazi regime and its war bring crop up. When her parents hide Max, a Jewish refugee, in the basement of their little house, Liesel befriends him, all the while living with the sense of fear and helplessness that such a situation would bring on any family trying to stay under the Nazi radar. Max furthers Liesels love for words, but also teaches her their destructive power. In the end, it is, as always, death who has the last word.

For most of the first half of the book, I was reading mechanically and didn't think much of the book. I didn't like its style, which was to precious for my taste, too obviously looking for sympathy by mimicking the confused girl's trains of thought and perception of the world. The story itself didn't strike me as particularly clever or special, it was the context that gave it its strength. Any novel about life in Nazi Germany, however, smacks of set books in secondary school (I HATED The Reader.) In fact, a quick look at the book's Amazon page furthered my suspicions that the book might be meant for young adults.
Towards the end, though, I felt more and more drawn in by the story. The style got better, or maybe I got used to it, and some passages were really moving in their simplicity and inherent sadness. Liesel's story is a sad one, and the book doesn't try to come up with a big dramatic ending. I didn't cry, but I can see how people might.
All in all, The Book Thief will not become one of my favourite books, but it will stay with me for a while, which is more than can be said for other books. I suppose that makes it better than I thought it would be.