This is a book for adolescent readers. Some sentences are really short. It got in the way of the style. It jumped around. It made death into a ghost. Death was a friend. It was easy to imagine all the bad things that happened to Liesel. She tried hard to learn to read. Her love of books and reading saved her.
I bet the movie is good. I will see it on DVD soon.
This book would be good for today's students to read. Many do not know about the Holocaust. They do not understand how awful it was. Some do not think it really happened.
Seriously. I admired the expressionistic German tone of this dynamic novel; it's beautifully written, lyric and poetic, the beauty making the horror more chilling and hot at once. Descriptions of sky and land are fresh and poignant, with a why-didn't-I-notice/think-of-that quality.
The action moves back and forth in time, offering us a watcher's position as Liesel lives through the events of the war.
Death as personified has a gothic German black angel appeal that is haunting and poetic.
I loved the artistic necessity of Max, the hidden Jew, who paints over Mein Kampf's pages to create a new book - an act of highest artistic subversion and moral redemption. Anselm Kiefer and Jasper Johns painted over and in books as acts of negation and rebirth; that art burns in my mind as I read this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment