Markus Zusak’s "The Book Thief"

As I read Markus Zusak’s “The Book Thief,” I kept wondering why the narrator—Death—was so determined to tell the story of a little girl named Liesel Meminger who has a penchant for stealing books.

The novel is set during World War II, a time when Death was extremely busy. The novel portrays him not as a Grim Reaper but as an overworked cynic, pushed to his limits by the endless backlog of souls he must extract from lifeless bodies. When we meet Death—I ascribed male features to him though I can’t remember whether the book does—he’s zipping back and forth from concentration camps to battlefields to bombed-out cities. “In 1943,” he tells us, “I was just about everywhere.”

Day and night, Death is a firsthand witness to the worst of humanity. He has every reason to forsake humankind, to dismiss us as a vile species not worth his time or attention. And yet even Death is moved by the courage and convictions of Liesel and her adoptive family. He is moved to tell her story.

And maybe that’s the point—that even amid genocide, small acts of love and kindness matter. There’s something fascinating about a species with such enormous capacity for both good and evil.

Overall, “The Book Thief” is sad, beautiful, poetic, and riveting. Its first fifty pages and last fifty pages rise to the level of masterpiece.

The best paragraph (p. 243):

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.