The Book Thief
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I haven't been effected so deeply by a book in a very long time, so The Book Thief has had me contemplating life pretty hard these last few days since I finished it. There are three main things that I took away from this book while I was reading it. They're all pretty broad topics, so this review could be quite long and rambly, but here we go.
1. The first thing I took away from The Book Thief was a question: Why do we, as humans, convince ourselves to hate each other so much?
Throughout the entire book, characters are struggling with their connection to the Nazi party. They are desperately trying to convince themselves that the Jews are meant to be blamed, the Jews are inferior, the Jews are bad, etc. etc. etc. Why?? Why was it so important that they pin unfounded blame on someone just to have a group to hate? And this is not a new concept. Since the beginning of time, people have been desperately searching for an outside group of people to blame for their own problems and insecurities. It doesn't make the least bit of sense to me.
The fact that it is RARE to find a person as compassionate as say, Liesel, from The Book Thief is so sad. Acceptance should not be something we struggle with, something that we can't seem to wrap our heads around. HATE should be what we struggle with and can't seem to understand!! I think you choose the people you love, and you choose the people you hate. But why is that? Why is it essential that we must choose someone to hate??
2. The second thing that I uncovered through reading this book is this: I think I understand what the colors are for. Let's back up: so all throughout the book, Death (the narrator) keeps mentioning these colors that he/she sees, mixing these colors into the stories that he/she is telling, and near the beginning of the book, I remember saying to SE "Yeah, it's really good so far but I don't get what the colors are for." Well, I think I know now. The whole time I was reading I kept getting frustrated at Death because she (let's just call her a she for the sake of not having to write "he/she" a billion times) kept bringing up all these colors, but I could never really connect them to the scenes. No matter whether she spoke of "waxy yellows" or "cloud-spat blues", "white--of the blinding kind" or "home-cooked red", I couldn't see the vivid and beautiful colors she described. As I read, the only color I could seem to see was grey. Rudy's hair was supposedly the color of lemons, but in my mind Rudy lived in a black and white world, and therefore had no discernible hair color. Liesel stole a red book, a black book, a green book, but in my mind, the books were all a murky brownish grey, just like the streets and the sky of Himmel Strausse. Everything was drab and ugly in hue. I think that was the purpose. Death lays all these delicious colors at your feet, but you're not allowed to see them. The story is too awful to afford any beauty. Any worthwhile color is drained away by the suffocating hideousness of the tale itself. The only beauty you are able to capture from this book comes not from the colors, but from the actions and words of the characters.
3. The last "discovery" that came to me from The Book Thief was more of a personal discovery than a discovery about the actual book. This is what I found out: I think I have a gift and a curse. I am effected by things at an incredibly deep level that even I cannot fathom. In order to understand what I mean by this, let's just set the stage a little bit.
I was in my bed, which is where I do most of my reading, and I was nearing the end of The Book Thief, getting more frightened with every page because I knew something terrible was about to happen, and then I read the words "Max Vandenburg remained standing. He did not drop to his knees. People and Jews and clouds all stopped. They watched. As he stood, Max looked first at the girl and then stared directly into the sky who was wide and blue and magnificent." (That's probably as close to where I started crying as I can hope to get. I can't remember exactly where it was). The tears came softly at first, just making their way silently down my face, blurring my vision a little, but not really interrupting my life very much. But as I read on, as things got better and worse all at once, as Liesel loved and lost, as her heart was mended, and ripped savagely apart, I had to stop every few pages because the intensity of everything was overwhelming. I remember tossing my kindle to the foot of my bed in rage, pressing clenched fists into my burning eyes, dragging my fingernails down my face, trying to distract myself from the internal pain I was feeling because of the book! I clenched my eyes shut so hard I gave myself a headache trying to keep my tears inside. My whole entire face was covered inch for inch in snot and salty tear stains, my chest ached from my heaving. I've never cried so hard before, and believe me, when I cry, I cry hard and long and it still looks like I'm crying thirty minutes afterwards! And the questions I kept asking myself in my rage, in my fit of angry tears--I was crying from sadness, and happiness at times, but mostly from just pure anger--were these: Why am I so effected by this? Why are these words causing me so much pain? They're not even real! How can I be so unbelievably enraged by things that have nothing to do with me, by words created by someone else? Why do I feel this way about a BOOK!? I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but I do know that I am a person full of passion. Everything I love I throw myself into with my entire heart and mind, so when the things I love break, or die, or are hurt or negatively changed in any way, I plummet depths that seem unattainable. When reading The Book Thief, I plummeted farther than I've probably ever plummeted, emotionally, before. Because I loved those people, those fictional entities derived from Markus Zusak's infinite brain! Liesel was my mother and my 
grandmother and my best friends and myself all in one. Rudy was my brother, and my father, and my grandfather, and every wonderful person I've ever met! Death was kind, Death was beautiful, Death had compassion! Why did I have to see them hurt and destroyed? How could Markus do that to me? I don't understand. But yet, I do understand, because I write, because I've hurt characters before, and in turn have hurt myself and readers. I understand, but I still don't like sitting in a bed of too-hot blankets, pouring out the contents of my eyes onto my lap and hands, my heart breaking over and over again with each new sentence. No matter how founded or beautiful the pain may have been, it was still pain, and it hurt.
-VaughnDL
I haven't been effected so deeply by a book in a very long time, so The Book Thief has had me contemplating life pretty hard these last few days since I finished it. There are three main things that I took away from this book while I was reading it. They're all pretty broad topics, so this review could be quite long and rambly, but here we go. 1. The first thing I took away from The Book Thief was a question: Why do we, as humans, convince ourselves to hate each other so much?
Throughout the entire book, characters are struggling with their connection to the Nazi party. They are desperately trying to convince themselves that the Jews are meant to be blamed, the Jews are inferior, the Jews are bad, etc. etc. etc. Why?? Why was it so important that they pin unfounded blame on someone just to have a group to hate? And this is not a new concept. Since the beginning of time, people have been desperately searching for an outside group of people to blame for their own problems and insecurities. It doesn't make the least bit of sense to me.
The fact that it is RARE to find a person as compassionate as say, Liesel, from The Book Thief is so sad. Acceptance should not be something we struggle with, something that we can't seem to wrap our heads around. HATE should be what we struggle with and can't seem to understand!! I think you choose the people you love, and you choose the people you hate. But why is that? Why is it essential that we must choose someone to hate??  |
| This is beautiful. |
3. The last "discovery" that came to me from The Book Thief was more of a personal discovery than a discovery about the actual book. This is what I found out: I think I have a gift and a curse. I am effected by things at an incredibly deep level that even I cannot fathom. In order to understand what I mean by this, let's just set the stage a little bit.
I was in my bed, which is where I do most of my reading, and I was nearing the end of The Book Thief, getting more frightened with every page because I knew something terrible was about to happen, and then I read the words "Max Vandenburg remained standing. He did not drop to his knees. People and Jews and clouds all stopped. They watched. As he stood, Max looked first at the girl and then stared directly into the sky who was wide and blue and magnificent." (That's probably as close to where I started crying as I can hope to get. I can't remember exactly where it was). The tears came softly at first, just making their way silently down my face, blurring my vision a little, but not really interrupting my life very much. But as I read on, as things got better and worse all at once, as Liesel loved and lost, as her heart was mended, and ripped savagely apart, I had to stop every few pages because the intensity of everything was overwhelming. I remember tossing my kindle to the foot of my bed in rage, pressing clenched fists into my burning eyes, dragging my fingernails down my face, trying to distract myself from the internal pain I was feeling because of the book! I clenched my eyes shut so hard I gave myself a headache trying to keep my tears inside. My whole entire face was covered inch for inch in snot and salty tear stains, my chest ached from my heaving. I've never cried so hard before, and believe me, when I cry, I cry hard and long and it still looks like I'm crying thirty minutes afterwards! And the questions I kept asking myself in my rage, in my fit of angry tears--I was crying from sadness, and happiness at times, but mostly from just pure anger--were these: Why am I so effected by this? Why are these words causing me so much pain? They're not even real! How can I be so unbelievably enraged by things that have nothing to do with me, by words created by someone else? Why do I feel this way about a BOOK!? I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but I do know that I am a person full of passion. Everything I love I throw myself into with my entire heart and mind, so when the things I love break, or die, or are hurt or negatively changed in any way, I plummet depths that seem unattainable. When reading The Book Thief, I plummeted farther than I've probably ever plummeted, emotionally, before. Because I loved those people, those fictional entities derived from Markus Zusak's infinite brain! Liesel was my mother and my grandmother and my best friends and myself all in one. Rudy was my brother, and my father, and my grandfather, and every wonderful person I've ever met! Death was kind, Death was beautiful, Death had compassion! Why did I have to see them hurt and destroyed? How could Markus do that to me? I don't understand. But yet, I do understand, because I write, because I've hurt characters before, and in turn have hurt myself and readers. I understand, but I still don't like sitting in a bed of too-hot blankets, pouring out the contents of my eyes onto my lap and hands, my heart breaking over and over again with each new sentence. No matter how founded or beautiful the pain may have been, it was still pain, and it hurt. -VaughnDL
HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
ReplyDeleteThanks! :)
ReplyDeleteThis review was amazing. Two thumbs up. And you are so right about the colors!
ReplyDeleteThank you! :)
ReplyDelete