The Book Thief

I have been reading Proust for months and I tell myself I have to finish all 6 tomes before moving onto another book. I am onto the fourth book, on page 400 for a week now, still have 400 pages to go to book five. I enjoy Proust but it's not easy reading. I was updating my virtual book shelf on facebook the other day and a like-minded reader piped, "she is always reading Proust and James Joyce but she thinks she will never finish either". I agree.

One day browsing at a book store I came across "The Book Thief". After leafing through a few pages, I couldn't resist buying it. The setting was Nazi Germany. Death was the narrator but it was not macabre in any way. The plot revolved around a nine year old girl and the events that happened in the five years Hitler rose to power.

The book reverberated with the goodness of human nature in those stark times. Nine year old Lisel was thrust into a foster home after witnessing her little brother's death and her mom branded a communist. At her new home, she found a loving papa who taught her to read the first book she stole, "The Gravedigger's Handbook", a book she had picked up from the cemetery where they buried her brother.

Interwoven was Death's narration of the souls he had carried away as the war raged on. Descriptions of hard times were told through the life of the young girl and her best friend Rudy, stealing apples, trading them for candies, playing soccer and yes, stealing books, from the Nazis burning and the mayor's library.

The most touching part of the story was Lisel's bonding with papa, a gentle and upright man "with silver eyes" and her friendship with Max, a Jew whom they had harbored in the basement.

"The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole...."

Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given a weather report like that. On the wall, he painted a long, tightly knotted rope with dripping yellow sun at the end of it, as if you could dive right into it. On a ropy cloud, he drew two figures--a thin girl and a withering Jew--they were walking arms balanced, towards the dripping sun."

I won't give away the ending but suffice to say, it is a book that stays with you for days after you have finished it. It has a lingering effect akin to "The Kite Runner". In those war torn years, Death carried away many souls. He always marveled at and questioned the best and worst in humans. However, when Death carried away the souls of little kids, he would always kiss them and carry them ever so lightly.

A good read.