“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”

Obscure mountain hut, kunanyi, Mt Wellington. May 2021.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

There were elements that I very much enjoyed in The Book Thief, but these were outweighed by moments of extreme eye-rolling. But, first things first: it is far too long. You could trim a good 150 to 200 pages and not lose anything. The broad contours are engaging and interesting but proceed in such a repetitive and irritating fashion that I was willing it to end.

This gets to my main problem with the book. Running at over 550 pages with a tiny cast of characters and an omnipresent and all-knowing narrator, how is it possible to finish with very little sense of Liesel, the person at the very centre of the story? Other characters - excepting dear Papa - act so strangely and contrary to what the narrator tells us is true to their hearts that it gets quite jarring at times. This is poor writing, pure and simple.

For certain, Death (our narrator) informs us an awful lot of things throughout (to the point of irritation), but Zusak (the author) is clearly of the school of telling rather than showing. Moreover, a lot of the telling is done in a hamfisted manner featuring some of the clumsiest phrasing and metaphors I've read to date. Sometimes it is fine to let a thing be a thing. Not everything needs to be compared to a vague sense of something completely unrelated.

The general premise of the story is fine, but the execution seems off. There is a triteness to the gimmicky presentation and cheesy solemnity to the narration. In reducing our key heroine (Liesel) and victim (Max) to ciphers rather than rich and realised characters, it feels to me that Zusak has transgressed against the gravity of the subject matter. I'd rather he played it for laughs than this mock-earnestness.

Perhaps if I hadn't read infinitely superior novels on the subject matter, I could let this one pass. Look, it's fine, but shallow. Compare and contrast with (to choose a few), Imre Kertész's Fatelessness, David Albahari's Götz and Meyer or Hubert Mingarelli's A Meal in Winter, you'll see what I mean.

⭐ ⭐

Comments

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