February 22, 2014 - Movie and Book Review: The Book Thief

I don't recall who recommended "The Book Thief" to us.  We (Katrina and I) started reading it out loud together maybe as long as 2 years ago.  It's been awhile.  From the very beginning, as Death (Death narrates the book) describes a sunset, you can tell the book is not a popcorn book.  We digested it in small chunks - 10 or 15 minutes here or there.  We stopped for a while, and started again, etc.  Right now we're 83% of the way through the book.  And then the movie came out.  We missed it in the theatres for the first run, but looking for a date, I crossed it at the second-run theatre by the mall.  So we went to see it today.

I will first say that some movies and books are entertainment, some are educational, some are enlightenment.  This movie is enlightenment. We don't watch R-rated movies, but I assume Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, and 12 Years a Slave are enlightening movies. On my list, I have The Blind Side, Australia, and now The Book Thief.  If you've missed them, find them.

Unlike most book/movie combos, you can consume either one first, and won't be disappointed.  I do highly recommend reading the book aloud.  It's meant to be read that way, to taste the words and feel the imagery dripping from the page, wet with meaning.  It's dense.

The story follows Liesel, a girl (11 yrs old when it starts) who is taken from her communist mother in Nazi Germany in 1938.  She is thrust into foster care and experiences the war from inside Germany - hiding a Jew in the basement, air raids, her foster father being sent off to war despite him being a WWI veteran.  It's an intense tale of loss, humanity, and barbarism.  The children's choir backing a montage of Krystallnacht hit me hard.  I cried at the end, and had to sit for a few minutes after it was over before I trusted myself to talk.

I suppose those are the important things to say.  I could talk about Zusak's literary style (more poem than prose), or character development (there's plenty, some predictable, some not), or the use of music throughout the movie, or the infrequent bouts of narration which are more common in the book than the movie.  But those are all secondary - I think the intent here is simply to illustrate the humanity of humans.  Our fallibility, heroism, foibles, silly joys and disappointments.  I learned from it, which is the highest praise I can ever offer a piece of fiction.