The most interesting part of reading The Book Thief- which has been disparagingly labeled as "Everything is Illuminated Lite" and "Harry Potter and the Holocaust" - is looking out for what makes a novel "'young adult fiction" as opposed to just plain "fiction." In addition to investigating the particulars that garner this book about death a PG-13 rating, it's also interesting to note a sort of self-fulfilling theme of the book, and how that theme manipulates the powers that be into lifting this work to the exalted status it enjoys. This is not to say that this is not quality work - Liesel's tale is beautiful and plucks the heartstrings with regularity, and experiencing the slow path toward a very known end is extraordinarily sad and effective. It is to say, though, that a heartfelt book about a strong-willed girl who defies abandonment by her parents, death, the holocaust, and a generalized terrifying childhood via a passionate obsession for words and books quite unsurprisingly grabbed the support of librarians everywhere. And because of the loud support of real-life lovers of words and books, this good but far-from-great novel feels over-exalted. Lisa Hilton called the book "simultaneously heart-wrenching and chirpily irritating," and while I would perhaps gives it more credit in the heart-wrenching category, I agree that certain aspects - notably "Death, the narrator" - annoy more than further the book's noble themes.
The general outline of the book: Liesel, a young German girl, takes a train ride with her mother and brother. Her brother dies en route with Liesel watching, and in a confused attempt at self-consolation, she steals a gravedigger's handbook as she leaves the funeral. Her mother then drops her off with a new family on Himmel ("Heaven") street in a small village outside of Munich. Her foster mother is harsh but ultimately loving, and her foster father is a poor, out-of-work painter who plays the accordion and more or less destroys your ambitions towards father of the year. He is superman. He also owes his life to a Jew who saved it in World War I, and consequently when that Jew's son, Max, requests his help, he feels obliged to give it. Mama, Papa and Liesel harbor the Jew at their peril. Liesel lives a charming if not charmed life against the backdrop of wartorn Germany - Papa teaches her to read via stolen and gifted books, and she becomes BFFs with Rudy, the crazy boy down the street. Her life, love of words/books, and the shenanigans she pulls (often with Rudy) serve as a rebellion against the dominant Nazi regime - indeed, a lot of the novel is intent on portraying the idea that there were anti-Nazi citizens of Germany who silently protested the Aryan ideals. I'll reveal no more to avoid spoiling the book, but it should not be surprising that in a book narrated by Death, things do not go very well.
The Death narrator, of course, sticks out. Zusak has made him a sort of patheti-tragic figure, one who is burdened by his task and "finds humans haunting." It is his inclusion that spurs a lot of the irritation mentioned above - his asides come fairly haphazardly, and it is his text that engages in the most "post-modern excesses" - bold faced type offsets, lists, few-worded quips to punctuate the story. My personal favorite parts of this book were when Death shut up for chunks at a time - while I admit that Death's revealing of the novel's end well before it occurred imbued the final arch of the narrative with a very powerful sense of dread, I otherwise found him to be over-simplistic. And this is what seems to throw the book into the Young Adult classification - an oversimplified archetypal narrator with witticisms that are cringe-worthy but deliver a surface-level profundity to the narrative.
And Death is not the only oversimplified element. As alluded to above, Papa's ne'er-failing ability to charm his daughter, do the right thing, never give into frustration and always come through upstanding give him a cartoonish quality. It is not as though he doesn't do "bad" things - his slapping of Liesel is quite memorable (though it was for a "good" effect), and his decision to help a Jew on a march to Dachau was idiotic (though again, fell into his "heart of gold" characterization). I don't have an objection to good-natured characters, but I think that the complete absence of temptation towards truly bad acts renders him an inauthentic archetype of "hero foster dad," and as such, his actions become predictable. The story is being told by Death as read from the memoirs of Liesel, so perhaps the intended effect is just that Liesel was incapable of seeing any flaws in her father's behavior. Regardless, he ended up being admirable but two-dimensional. Mama, too, was the scolding mama who actually had the loving heart; a Hitler Youth Group leader was "the obnoxious bully." So one factor in the YAF-label is an under-realization of characters.
The detail of this novel is also quite sparse. The novel just seemed to have missing information - sure, there was ample description of book-burnings and Hitler parades, but all of these had a "reference and move on" quality that made it seem as though the experience had been culled from the ephemera of pop culture rather than a deeply historical reference point. I mention this mainly because in interviews with Markus Zusak, he discusses his distaste for research but notes how he "read up on the apple seasons in Germany so that Liesel and Rudy would be thieving from orchards at the right time of year." This plainly strikes me as bizarre - a detail that seems largely unimportant is obsessed over, whereas the reality of book burnings gets a sort of "there was a pile of books, and it was burning" treatment. All of this invites questions of the point of authenticity and the twisted nature of fiction set against a historical background - e.g., if you are already fabricating characters and their stories against a "real event," what details need to be "real" and which can be manipulated? Several sections of "need to be real" detail got this cliched treatment. It's certainly difficult to do much better - seriously, after Night has described death marches and Anne Frank has described the reality of being hidden away, what sort of authenticity could Zusak really hoped to have added - but it is an element that seem sot point again toward YAF writing, that predictable and played details are displayed, and the reader is required to do a lot of filling in. The reader's filling in, of course, being largely dictated by his own film and fiction experiences of World War II, ending up in a very strange territory, indeed.
One thing I did strongly appreciate was Zusak's ability to show the dire circumstances of his main characters. He avoided the dreadful sentiments of "Swing Kids" - the whole "oh, the poor Nazi boys can't dance to jazz while Jews are murdered next door" element - by emphasizing the distinction between the dominant Nazi ideals coming from the rich and elite in contrast with the struggling-to-get-by lower classes. Papa loses work because of sympathy for the Jews, equating access to affluence with assimilation to Nazi party ideals. Mama's slow client-attrition throughout the novel and her repeated thinning of the soup portray a real struggle, and Liesel et al seem more victims of circumstance than active head-turners. At no point does Liesel and Rudy's mischievous fun seem ridiculous in light of the plight of their near-neighbors - their younger age and severely poor status makes it clear that they are struggling to survive and find hope in the world, not just trying to enjoy their free time with music. Liesel's struggle with love, her hatred of the Fuhrer, etc., give light to a real circumstance in Nazi Germany, the truly-oppressed who had no power - save their brave efforts to save Max - to battle the overwhelming majority sentiments.
The Book Thief's primary theme is undoubtedly the power of words in the face of such dire circumstances. The text repeatedly draws anti-parallels between Liesel's do-anything efforts to have access to books and Hitler's own abuse of words to control and effort to suppress words that did not fit his plans. This is the biggest YAF distinction - a simplistic moral to the story that pits the young individual and her love of books v. the most powerful man ever. Again, the central role of "books" here seems like borderline product-placement in an attempt to garner bibliophilic support - "Mark Zusak approved this message." "The power of words" is a heinously over-simplified concept - one need only remember that it wasn't just Mein Kampf that turned a nation into an evil-idea driven killing machine, but an overwhelmingly complicated set of socioeconomic/political circumstances (not to mention video, speech, etc.). The central theme, then, is an overly-plain reduction of a complicated story. That's not a "bad" thing, it's just the big thing that limits the scope of the novel. Ultimately, this book is good not because of its message or overarching concepts. It's power lies entirely within Liesel and her all-too-human relationships, the brutal pain caused by death and the lifetime regret of ne'er-kisses. Even if some of the characters are too archetypal and unreal, the novel nails pain, and the realism of that lesson is good for all adults, young or not.
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