This is the story of Leisel Memminger, a foster child in Nazi Germany. In 1939, her brother died on the train to Molching, their new home, and nine year-old Leisel stole her first book. She couldn’t read, but she would learn. The act was a prelude to what she would become: A book thief.
The question “why” is the crux of the novel. For nine year-old Leisel, that first book was a physical link to a brother dead and buried in a town of which she didn’t know the name. The second book was pulled a year later, from a smoldering Nazi bonfire for reasons she didn’t yet understand, but would once her foster fathers’ debt to an old friend has them hiding a Jew in their basement. Words have tremendous power, especially in Nazi Germany, a nation rebuilt of equal parts pride and hatred and Leisel’s thefts are an act of repossession, of reclaiming words for herself in a world drowning in war.
Leisel steals from bonfires and from the library of the mayor’s wife. She steals apples and potatoes and ham for the priests with her best friend, Rudy Stiener. Leisel goes to Hitler youth meetings and then reads her stolen books with Max, the man in the Hubbermans’ basement, who first teaches her to reclaim language when he whitewashes pilfered pages of “Mein Kampf” to write his own story. Leisel’s thievery is transformed into an act of giving; First by reading to deathly ill Max and later to her lonely neighbor and finally to the neighborhood as they hid in bomb shelters during the Munich air raids. The readings become an outlet for the people of Himmel Street from whom death and war have slowly been stealing everything.
The most interesting thing about “The Book Thief” is its narrator; the omniscient first-person of Death itself. Death opens the story with three instances where he met Leisel but did not take her. Death is calm, his narration poetic. He sees the lives he takes as colors in the sky and sounds in the air. After thousands of years in his position he has grown unnerved by humans, disturbed by their contradictory natures. Death understands the connection between stealing and giving that Leisel embodies. The people of Molching perceive war as stealing away the lives of their children, but Death sees it differently: “I’ve seen so many young men over the years who think they’re running at other young men. They’re not. They’re running at me.”
Death tells Leisel’s story because she is a “perpetual survivor” someone whose life encapsulates the beauty and horror of human life. “The Book Thief” is Deaths’ retelling of “The Book Thief,” the autobiography Leisel wrote at 14, framing her life through the theft of words. Death pulled the black book from the Himmel street rubble in 1943 and returned it to Leisel on her dying day over sixty years later. He tells her, “I am haunted by Humans.”
And so ends “The Book Thief,” a beautifully written work of fiction about the fragility of human life, the inevitability of death and the necessity of feeding the soul.