a little over a week ago, i had the courage to pick this book up from my dusting shelf and leaf through the pages again. i thought the courage was temporary and would eventually be futile but i underestimated myself.in the same way, this story is never to be underestimated.
"the book thief' was set in 1939 in the nazi-plagued germany, our protagonist arrives on the lonely street of himmel, a german word which translates to 'heaven.' she was nine years old when i first met her. days before that, her younger brother died due to a lethal cough and her mother resorted to putting her in a foster home. her name was liesel meminger. and before giving color to the inane life on himmel street, she took something that did not belong to her. she took the grave digger's handbook (from none other than the grave digger in her brother's snow-laden burial).
she did not know how to read - it was her foster father who taught her how to, a placid soul who knew the weight of pain and somehow lightened the burden by playing his accordion. her foster mother, as the author has written, was made entirely of cardboard - unfeeling, unattached and has the fancy habit of calling people 'saukerl' or 'saumensch (look it up in the duden dictionary). this family hid a jew in their basement, just when hitler and his minions were in the height of their power. she has also denied her best friend the chance of a kiss - several times. and as the title suggested, she went through this pleasurable era of stealing books. and unfortunately, there were no available recovery programs to help lift her from her subtle addiction.
liesel found liberation in learning, as we all have, i suppose. but the very thing she loved the most - words - was the reason her country and its people were trapped for so long, in the claws and daggers of the nazi regime.
i found myself reaching for the book between my wake and my slumber. fumbling through several pages, or a dozen pages at a time, which totally depended on my ability to keep myself awake. and then i could not stop thinking about how the story would end, as i seem to have formed an affinity for the tragedy and victory of its characters, and all the little stories they lived through during this war-torn era.
it was more than being war-torn. take...war-ransacked or war-robbed. as i approached the last 80 pages, i suddenly had this feeling of wanting to read it slow-motion. or at least i attempted to prolong devouring the last few bits of it, i was afraid of what i would find in the end. i could not conceive of the atrocity that happened several decades ago - and the fact that it did unfold, and that real people suffered.
perhaps the best realization was that it was not fiction at all. these were real events. more real than any real thing or occurrence could get. that in that god-forsaken place, young girls such as liesel did exist - that people like her had to endure all the monstrosity depicted in the book.
markus zusak produced a brilliant novel, which is both a silver lining in the sky at dawn and the thunderclap in the darkest nights of our existence. written with death (without a scythe, as it explained) as the narrator, it is blunt as it is humorous. i have spent the last couple of days feeling depressed - because the story told truth in its rawest form, and because i simply could not help myself.
the photograph you see was taken that very same day i bought it - out of compulsion - and i am glad i stopped to read the gist and gave it to myself for christmas.
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