The Book Thief
Hey guys!
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak was
published back in 2005. And as I have just said I have high expectations for
this book and the reality didn’t live up to those. I found some great things in
the book and some that are not so great. I mean I only really enjoyed the last
100 pages, meaning that my obsession with no leaving books in the middle is
justified.
This story takes place during the
Second World War and we follow Liesel a little girl that moves into a little
town near München. She lives with a family that adopted her. During the novel
we follow the live of the characters and I don’t want to tell much more: first
because there is no much left to tell and second because of spoilers.
I think I should star by saying that
I don’t like when spoilers are made to me. I don’t like when in the first 100
pages the narrator tells me what´s going to happen. I don’t think that in a
story that is so much driven by the characters as this one is something that
works well. That made me not be curious about what wold happen next.
I haven’t enj0oyt the writing either.
This is the first book that I read by Marcus Zusak, but I don’t think that I
will be reading any other of his works. I haven’t liked the choice of the Death
as a narrator. Of course, is something new, but is not well done in my opinion.
Also, I haven’t enjoyed the humour; I consider it to be quite dark. Plus, the
little notes that the Death is costly making during the narration make the story
to be way slower than it actually was.
The death is the narrator as I have
already said, and this make hard to identify who the protagonist is. There are
some parts in which you think that the protagonist is Liesel, but then you come
to think that you are mistaken, and that the protagonist is the Death. And I didn’t
like Death as a character, I found her to be rather macabre.
Regarding the rest of the characters
of the book I have mixed feelings. So, I really like, Hans for instance; and
some of them just felt plain to me, as is the case of Liesel, I mean I didn’t even
care for her.
When reading this book, I felt like
the author completely forgot about all the scale of greys. There is no single
character that has any doubts about their personality. The “good boys” are extremely
good and the “bad boys” are extremely bad and the reason is just because. I know
that this book is about a very sad period in the recent history, but I honestly
think that some things are taken to the extreme in order to make you hate
Hitler, thing that I found to be not necessary, because we all know what
happened. I think is a book for younger readers and I think that the author is
not correct in the way he expresses certain things.
Finally, I don’t think that this book
makes a correct portrait of the Germans, mostly for what I mention of taking
the things to extremes. I am not German myself, but I have lived there, and I don’t
think that German people is as is written in this book. Maybe it´s that we are
talking about different generations, but I think that is more related to the
way characters are portrayed
However, I can totally understand why
everyone keep saying that this book is amazing. I consider the last 100 pages
to be a master piece and the reason why I don’t quite books until I am done with
them. And I think the last 100 pages are only as good as they are because of
the rest of the story, but the other 400 pages were boring.
To sum up, I think that this book has
some issues as I have mentioned but I can understand why people like it. However,
I haven’t connected with the book as I would have liked. Overall, I gave this
book 3 out of 5 stars.
See you all in my next post.
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