The Book Thief

Things have been more than a bit busy lately, and I've read a few books in the meantime.

Moshe's been on my case for a while to read The Book Thief, and I finally got around to it.  My feelings on the book are surprisingly mixed.  On the one hand, Zusak is a really good writer, and his tale of Liesel the book thief has a lot of emotional punch to it.  On the other hand, it almost feels like he doesn't trust himself to deliver on the punch, and so he brings in Death has a narrator.  Death allows him to distance us from the story in a few ways.

Most obviously, Death loves lists, and Zusak sometimes sticks in a list to jump out of an emotional situation, like "4 things that were going through his head at that moment" or whatever.  It struck me as very Vonnegut-like, but Vonnegut manages to make these asides gut-wrenching, while Zusak makes them alienating.  I suspect that this is on purpose; Zusak strikes me as too much in control of his material not to notice the distancing effect he's having.  It feels like he wants to dodge any charges of sentimentality by adding in a post-modern tinge.

And this brings me to the second way Death acts as a distancing effect.  Because he already knows how it's all going to turn out, Zusak can use Death to tell you a few times exactly what's going to happen.  In particular, he deflates the whole scene where Hans leaves for the army, because Death has already told us twice that Hans will not be killed while he's a soldier.  Rudy's death is still devastating, even though Death tells us way in advance that it's going to happen, but I can't think of any way in which the spoiler improves the novel.

So, in the end, I was impressed by the novel (more than Jenna, I think), but I wish that Zusak had taken the paradoxical risk of telling the story more straight-forwardly.