Australia: Markus Zusak – The Book Thief
Although author Markus Zusak is Australian, he has a German mother and an Austrian father. Zusak listened to and understood his parents’ stories of their childhoods in Munich and Vienna under the Third Reich, which taught him more about the Regime than Western history textbooks tell us now. The rebellious protagonist is Liesel, the book thief herself, who is used as Zusak’s defence against the claim that Hitler managed to brainwash Germany in its entirety; this story shows a snippet of the absence of complete conformity when it came between a girl and passion for lovelier words than Hitler’s, words in more logical and kind books than Mein Kampf. The story follows Liesel as she learns to read, attempts to read every book she can find, and eventually becomes a writer, something the daughter of a Communist could never have done without a slight rebellion under the totalitarianism Hitler did not achieve.
Something so harrowing about the novel is how its ominous and omnipotent narrator is Death itself. Zusak so elegantly reminds the reader through this narrator that death is lingering around the everyday and through war equally. It follows the book thief through the story and touches the ones she loves every so often. It’s truly a heart-wrenching story of the destructions of war on the other side of the ‘them and us’ ideology, reclaiming the humanity inside enemy nations and reinforcing the humanitarian fact that there is a difference between the opinions of one country and the individual from there.
Words by Caitlin O’Connor