Book review: The Book Thief

August's book club book - The Book Thief - is a hugely bestselling, award-winning, and well-reviewed account of the events that befall young Liesel Meminger during World War II after she is orphaned and sent to live on Himmel Street with foster parents Hans and Rosa Hubermann. The book is narrated by Death, who despite his stereotypical depiction on the cover art, insists that he doesn't have a skull-like face, or a scythe.

The Book Thief is undoubtedly well-written, in a literary way. As usual with literary works it has almost no plot to speak of, but meanders its way pleasantly enough through Liesel's few years on Himmel Street. There are no spoilers here (unlike in that Wikipedia entry linked above), but several things conspired to dull my enjoyment of this book to the point where it ended up on the metaphorical pile of those I've read and ended up thinking "so what."

So much of this novel seems cynically designed to appeal to lovers of literary work. To make it stand out from the crowd, rather than concentrating on its story. The device of using Death as narrator adds nothing to the work, and Zusak's depiction of Death has none of the humour of Pratchett's Mort, and none of the chill horror of the traditional Grim Reaper. He's just a sad old gatherer of souls, disinterestedly looking upon the lives of those he waits to collect and enjoying only the faintest and most occasional glimmer of excitement when he comes across a story like that of the book thief. How apt. Because only someone with an equally boring and monotonous existence could revel in this tale.

Even the descriptive passages and figurative language felt calculated to me. Calculated to elicit the maximum effect from the literati as they ooh and ahh over each new turn of phrase. 'Tears like wire', 'hair like splinters (or twigs) brushed away from a face with a wooden hand'. As if the author pored over his work groping and grasping for an original way to say something and - yes - finding it, but in the end, so what? Mostly they stuck out like the points on barbed wire, scratching my eyes as they scanned the text.

One or two of the characters stood out - Hans and Rudy are probably worth mentioning - but overall I couldn't develop any empathy with any of them until the last 30-40 pages, by which time I'd long since written the book off. I'm not a huge fan of WWII literature in any case (see my February review) so in the end this was just another heap of meh. I gave it 5 out of 10, but in the group discussion it gained two 10s and a good smattering of 9s, so don't take my word for it.