In one sense, the story is very tragic, filled with losses. To learn about her childhood struggle in a very tense, cruel, grim place and time, you’ll have to read the book, or see the film (now released as a DVD), but she copes with her difficult situation only to have some deaths of beloved people severely damage her life again. She suffers from a sense of insecurity, and from nightmares-“a girl made of darkness.” That starts the plot.Īt the outset, Liesel is a charming but quiet eleven-year-old with psychological problems. Moreover, he has a certain compassion for “the survivors,” the people with “punctured hearts” who “are left behind.” Of course, “The Book Thief” is his account of one such person, a girl named Liesel Meminger, who is stunned by the death of her little brother, then abandoned by her persecuted mother, and then taken in by foster parents-during 1939. And far from being a kind of impersonal monster, as Death personified has been commonly portrayed, he promises “to carry you gently away.” As he says to the reader at the outset, “You are going to die,” and then he explains that he is not malicious, just an aspect of the way things are. The most unusual aspect of the book is that Death narrates the story. Also, by depicting people who cope with the hate-filled, and increasingly death-haunted, culture of Germany under Hitler, the book centers on the issue of coping with death-both the impact of it and the fear of it. It is a story about human struggle and resilience, in the face of oppression and personal trauma. One of the more thought-provoking novels in recent years is “The Book Thief” (2005), by Markus Zusak, which remained on the “New York Times” bestseller list for well over four years and was finally filmed in 2013.
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