Reading The Book Thief

By Wayne Qian

        [中文提要：《偷书贼》是一本非同一般的小说。故事发生在第二次世界大战时期的德国。休伯曼夫妇自己有两个长大已经分居的孩子，但是他们却高兴地收养了一个年仅9岁的女孩，名叫丽瑟尔。后来又把一名年岁稍大的犹太人麦克斯偷偷地藏在加中的地下室。丽瑟尔在上附近的小学读书前，休伯曼先生已经教她读书识字，所用的课本是她在来来他家的途中从他弟弟的墓地偷来的一本书，叫做《掘坟手册》。该书不是教人挖坟寻宝，而是教人怎么掘坟，以便埋葬死人。

        丽瑟尔住在休伯曼贾里的那几年里，希特勒的势力越来越强大。德国百姓的生活开始充满恐惧。如，纳粹青年组织搞“焚书活动”，强迫大家把除希特勒《我的奋斗》之外的书交出， 眼睁睁地看着自己心爱的书被熊熊大火吞噬。

        可是，丽瑟尔在这段时间里却与众不同。她读的第二本书就是从火场上偷来的。她后来又有机会从小市市长家里偷了好几本书，如饥如渴地阅读。读书、学习使她成长为一个充满爱心和勇气的女孩。她和休伯特夫妇一起对麦克斯悉心照顾，使他在极端困难的情况下生存下来。她和麦克斯的相似命运给两人增添了深厚的友谊。麦克斯心中一方面充满对休伯特夫妇和丽瑟尔的感激，另一方面又牢记对于希特勒的深仇大恨（他常常在梦中和希特勒进行拳击比赛）。他利用地下室有限的条件进行创作，写了两本图文并茂的小书：它们就包括在《偷书贼》这部小说中。小说中插进图文并茂的小小说，在我还是第一次见到。

        小说用第一人称讲述故事，可与众不同的是，那讲述故事的人竟是“死神”。我们如果考虑小说的时代背景，会知道那是第二次世界大战前夕至战争结束之前，无数人（尤其是犹太人）死亡的年代。死神不分昼夜，在大地上游走，收罗刚刚死去的人的尸体和灵魂。作者的精心安排一点儿也不奇怪吧。

        正因为此，一位书评作者说，“这是一部关于勇气、友谊、爱、生存、死亡和悲伤的故事。”

        小说的另一特点是作者精心推敲书中出现的几乎每一个动词，务使它们能够像一幅幅图画一样深深地印在读者的脑海。我在阅读时常常想，要是谁想把这部小说翻译成中文，一定会遇到许多意想不到的困难。（下面的英文述评中摘录了小小的一段。有兴趣这不妨看一看。）

        小说作者马库斯  ∙  祖萨克的父母在纳粹德国和奥地利长大。他和家人现在则定居在澳大利亚。]

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, a writer whose parents grew up in Nazi Germany and Austria and who now resides with his family in Australia, is an unusual novel.

The book owes its unusualness first to its narrator being none other than Death. As the novel unfolds in Germany in the late 1930s and early 40s, Death is especially busy roaming the land and collecting bodies and souls. The reader sees through Death’s perspective how real-life deaths happen to people of different ages, beliefs, and positions, how life or death can just be a matter of accidentalness and how an accident begets another accident.

In the case of Liesel Meminger, the heroine of the novel, she saw the first death in her life in 1939, when she was only nine years old. Her mother took a train with her bound for Molching, Germany, where she was to be adopted by the Hubermanns. Her little brother, who was with them, died unexpectedly of malnutrition on the way. And the first thing her mother did when they got off the train was to have the boy buried. It was shortly after the burial that something of profound importance happened: Liesel picked up (or rather stole?) a book entitled The Grave Digger’s Handbook. Did she do it because she loved looks? No. At the time, she didn’t even know how to write her own name. It was pure curiosity that propelled the girl to pick up the book and pocket it. But it was that incident that triggered her love for books and book-stealing, around which the whole novel revolves.

Fact is, when she settled down with the Hubermmans, her adoptive father Hans Hobermmans was putting her bed in order one day when the book dropped onto the floor. The man asked Liesel if she would like to learn to read. She said yes. And the cigarette-puffing, accordion-playing man began to teach her to read and write, using the very first book she had stolen.

It is a universal truth that under a tyrannical ruler books meet their worst fate: they are burnt without discrimination and the only survivors tend to be those written or favored by the ruler. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazi Youth organized book-burning events in cities and towns at which all the locals were expected to donate books for burning and to be present. Ironically, it was at one of those events that Liesel came to have her second book: She stole it when no Nazi followers were nearby.

And then there were the third and the fourth books, which Liesel stole from the private library of the mayor of the town. The girl was helping her mother to deliver laundry to the mayor’s grand house when her eye was caught by the many books standing on the shelves. With the tacit consent of her husband, the woman was kind enough to allow her to pick a book or two to bring home to read. The girl took advantage of that and came back with a boy named Rudy to steal more. Interestingly, the mayor’s wife was fully aware of what she was doing, but she loved the girl so much that she shut her eyes to it. On one occasion, she even left a book standing at the windowsill so the girl could take it easily.

One thing about Liesel’s reading habit is noteworthy: the outstanding absence of Hitler’s My Struggle (Mein Kampf) in her book list. The girl was reading one book after another, but never once did she turn the pages of Hitler’s writing. And the reason is critical: Mr. Hans Hubermman, who was a veteran of WWI, didn’t like wars at all, so much so that he clashed with his only son, who was a fanatic follower of Hitler and joined the German army to fight first in Poland and then in Russia.

A second major factor that contributes to the unusualness of the novel is the author’s knack for focusing. Hitler as a fascist leader has appeared in numerous books since the fall of the Third Reich (1933-1945). How was the author to present him in his novel? He had to adopt a new approach, one that was different from any other approach hitherto. Only then could he hope to succeed.

The author succeeded by focusing not on the battlefields, whether it was Russia or other parts of Europe or Africa though there were a few references to the harsh war and natural conditions around the city of Stalingrad. Instead, the author focused on the life and struggle of ordinary German citizens during the war. As for Hitler, he focused on his extraordinary skills at wielding words to promote his own cause, namely, conquering the world. To put it another way, Hitler was a super-propagandist, more than a match for his left-handed man Gobel, who believed that a lie, when repeated a thousand times, became a fact or truth.

It was that focus that made it possible for the author to describe at length the many months when a young Jew came to join the Hubermman family and how he developed a profound friendship with Liesel. The Jew’s name is Max. He had been sent to Hubermman’s home on a promise the war veteran had made to one of his comrade-in-arms on the battlefield, one who saved his life. It was to provide shelter for his son if need be. It must have been many years before the son, that is, Max, actually came to seek help from Hubermman. A promise-keeper as he was, Hubermman readily took the young man under his wing.

For over 27 months, the young man lived with the Hubermmans, spending almost every night in a dark and damp basement for fear of being discovered. Thus it was with pure joy that one day he had a chance to glance through an upstairs window to see the sunlight. On one occasion, however, he was on the verge of collapse when the combined care of the Hubermmans and Liesel brought him back from the clutches of Death. In this young Jew, the reader sees not just the cruelty of the Hitler regime and the kindness of the ordinary Germans, but also the strong desire of all Jews to survive. More important, Max did something unusual in the basement. He cut out a collection of pages from Mein Kamph and painted over them in white; the paint was easily available to him because Mr. Hubermman was  a painter by profession. When the paint was dry, he began to write a story with pictures. When he was finished, he used a knife to pierce the pages and tie them with string. The result was a 13-page booklet that appears in the middle part of the novel.

And here’s the third factor that contributes to the unusualness of the book: unlike any other book, fiction or non-fiction, that I’ve read, it contains pictures accompanied by simple sentences. They tell the bad dreams the young Jew had over a long period of time, including his first few weeks in the basement. Then they go on to tell something important. A shadow appeared beside his bed and stood above him. It was a girl who asked him to tell her his dream. After that, she told him her own dreams, which were similar in nature. They became friends, a friendship whose value could not be overestimated to either of them. And, as can be imagined, the girl in the pictures was none other than Liesel.

It is important to remember that many of Max’s bad dreams were about his fight with Hitler. Max, incidentally, loved boxing even when he was a child. He was not big in statue, but he fought again and again, and he fought to win. His rivals might find it easy to beat him at first, but somehow, his tenacity and boxing skills would enable him to turn the table on them and beat them in the end even though his face and body were covered with blood and bruises. And his repeated fight with Hitler in his dreams was undoubtedly symbolic of the Jews’ hatred of the worst monster humankind has ever seen.

The last but not the least factor that contributes to the novel’s unusualness is the figurative language the author uses throughout the book. Some of us might think that he went a bit too far in this respect because some of the word collocations found in the novel are somewhat strange, or even impossible. Let’s look at some examples:
           “When Liesel left that day, she said something with great uneasiness. In translation, two giant words were struggled with, carried on her shoulder, and dropped as a bungling pair at Ilsa Hermann’s feet. They fell off sideways as the girl veered with them and could no longer sustain their weight. They sat on the floor, large and loud and clumsy.

* * * TWO GIANT WORDS * * *

                  I’m Sorry”

  A reader may ask, “How can a person carry two words on his or her shoulder, drop them as a bungling pair at someone’ feet? And how can they fall off sideways? But if he reads the novel, he will find that the author is using his words, especially verbs, in a figurative way all the time. There are hundreds and thousands of examples of this kind. In an interview the author gave, there is this question put to him: “Your use of figurative language seems natural and effortless. Is this something you have to work to develop, or is it innately a part of your writing style?”

 Here are the first few lines of his answer: “I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It’s probably what I love most about writing – that words can used in a way that’s like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around… They are the best moments in a day of writing – when an image appears that you didn’t know would be there when you started work in the morning.” As for “natural and effortless,” he admits that to create an image, it sometimes takes time working and reworking. Actually, “It took three years to write this book.”
             And a word keeps coming to my mind time and again as I read the novel. It is word crafter. Markus Zusak is definitely a great word crafter.