The Book Thief

The book has an unusual narrator: Death himself. He is described as someone tired, who carries souls away and notices the colors of the sky at every farewell. Instead of being frightening, he is a little melancholy, and he tells the story of a girl who intrigued him so much that he kept her book.

The story takes place in Nazi Germany, between 1939 and 1943. The big events of the war stay in the background. The focus is a poor street in a small town, where ordinary people suffer, resist, feel afraid and help each other.

This view from the bottom up gives the novel a human tone. Instead of generals and speeches, we see kitchens, basements and kids playing soccer while the war creeps closer.

Liesel Meminger is nine years old when she rides a train with her mother and her younger brother, Werner, heading to a family that will foster her. On the way, her brother dies. They stop in a small town to bury him, and there, in the snow, the girl sees a little book fall from a gravedigger's pocket. She picks it up without anyone seeing. It is her first theft.

The book, which she cannot read yet, is a gravedigger's manual, and it becomes the only keepsake of her brother. Her mother, persecuted for her politics and without means, leaves her daughter with a couple in Molching, a town near Munich, on Heaven Street.

The Hubermanns are Hans, a kind house painter, and Rosa, a washerwoman with a sharp tongue and an enormous heart. Rosa yells more than she hugs, but she protects the girl in her own way, and the house slowly becomes a home.

Heaven Street has an ironic name: it is a street of modest houses, where food is scarce and nosy neighbors are plentiful. In this setting, of doors that open and windows that watch, the girl will grow up, caught between missing her real mother and the awkward affection of her new family.

Hans plays the accordion in bars and rolls his own cigarettes. At night, when Liesel wakes from nightmares in which she sees her dead brother again, he sits beside her, quiet, and plays softly. Little by little, the girl comes to trust him, and the house stops feeling strange.

She discovers she cannot read, and she feels ashamed. Hans offers to teach her, in the small hours, in the basement. They paint letters on the wall and put words together with a bit of paint, until the gravedigger's manual becomes something she can read. With his cigarette lit and a father's patience, Hans teaches more than letters.

It is one of the tenderest passages. The book shows that learning to read, when it comes with affection, becomes a way of being cared for, and that writing can be inherited from someone who loves you, not just from someone who studies.

Hans, by the way, is the kind of father who does not give speeches. He teaches by example: patience with the paint, calm on the accordion and firmness when doing right demands courage. Liesel learns from him that being strong and being gentle can go hand in hand.