In the sixty-seventh and sixty-eighth chapters of The Book Thief, Liesel is finally given the gift that Max prepared for her, and she gives a gift of sorts to Rudy Steiner. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read The Book Thief.
I’d like to think that purpose of Mark Reads (and, to an extent, Mark Watches) boils down to an appreciation of the written word. (That’s why it’s only to an extent with television, which starts off with the written word, but the medium takes it elsewhere.) I’ve told the stories enough times over the last year and a half, but some of it bears repeating. I started reading at a young age and by the time I was ten, I was trying to emulate whomever I was obsessed with at the time. It started off with Edgar Allan Poe, then my youthful obsession with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, and then I tried my best at creating grandiose character studies during my obsession with Jane Austen and Dostoevsky. None of it quite felt more than a cheap imitation, and none of it ever satisfied the pangs of creativity inside of me. My style developed those last two years of high school and, despite that I didn’t know it at the time, evolved more towards a staccato, rhythmic tone, with sharp, jagged sentences, sometimes spilling into lengthy diatribes of diction and grammar if it felt right. I took cues from Camus, but for a while, I thought I was a ~totally special snowflake~ until I read Palahniuk and Cormac McCarthy and Alice Munro and realized I wasn’t really doing anything that special anyway.
Still, I struggle to find my voice and I know that, at the very least, I’ve found a cathartic release in my writing. I know that my words hold power, even if no one reads them, and that’s a good place for me to be in as a writer. I’ve always appreciated the extent to which words have played such an integral part of my entire growth as a person, and it’s easy for me to look back at my hardest times and pick out books, lyrics, or things I wrote at the time (WHICH WERE TRULY AWFUL, BY THE WAY) that got me through those moment.
At the same time, I know that words also hold the power to harm or twist our perception of events and other people, and sometimes it’s just the placement of them that can do something subtle and sinister within our subconscious. I’m glad I started off with the Twilight series for the Mark Does Stuff INTERNET EMPIRE because it was like the very best training grounds for hyper-analyzing literature with a critical and analytical eye. I was thinking this past weekend how easy AP Lit and AP Language would be for me these days because I basically write a six page paper per day on just one chapter of a book. Seriously, guys, if I went back to school, I would be a paper-writing machine. Maybe I should just do that as a job for shitty college students.
OK ANYWAY, THAT IS NOT THE POINT. The point is that I’ve always wanted to be specific and pedantic about books and literature, and this site allows me to do that with a whole lot of others who enjoy doing the same thing. We appreciate words in a different way than others do. This does not mean we enjoy words in a better way. It’s just different, it suits our needs, and it pleases our intellect. The end! And I like that it’s this simple for me, because then I can enjoy other things in my life in ridiculously simplistic ways. Like eating food. Or sleeping. mmmmm sleeeeppppp.
I mean, there are other aspects to this whole absurd venture that I’m on that are far more meta that explain why this is so fun to me, but at heart, I love words. And I love (and fear) what they can do. The Book Thief uses that very concept to build its emotional core, and it’s words that seem to save these characters, time and time again.
I just vomited out seven hundred words because I stared at an empty page for fifteen minutes, hoping I’d get an email or a text message to occupy my time, fiddling with the settings in the hopes that some thought would spark deep in brain, and I’d figure out a way to talk about The Word Shaker that wasn’t just a blubbering of praise and sadness mixed in with my watery eyes. No one I ever knew on a personal level ever wrote a book specifically for and about me the way that Max Vandenburg does for Liesel. But I think about my intricate and emotional attachments to authors like Albert Camus or Alice Munro or Arundhati Roy or Edgar Allan Poe or Carson McCullers and there’s a part of me that will always believe that their books were for me. Of course these people will never know me. I don’t play a single part of their novels. But it’s the closest I’ll come to a spiritual experience, and it’s the closest I’ll come to feeling like I’m not alone.
For Liesel, that author is Max Vandenburg, and just before Christmas in 1942, Rosa Hubermann realizes it’s time for her to receive Max’s sketchbook, the one she swore to herself she wouldn’t read until she was supposed to.
“He said to give this to you when you were ready,” she said. “I was thinking your birthday. Then I brought it back to Christmas.” Rosa Hubermann stood and there was a strange look on her face. It was not made up of pride. Perhaps it was the thickness, the heaviness of recollection. She said, “I think you’ve always been ready, Liesel. From the moment you arrived here, clinging to that gate, you were meant to have this.”
How poetic of Rosa. She speaks the truth, admittedly, because Max and Liesel share a disconnected form of sorrow that they both try to escape using their words. In that sense, this sketchbook was always hers.
Liesel held it with soft hands. She stared. “Thanks, Mama.”
She embraced her.
There was also a great longing to tell Rosa Hubermann that she loved her. It’s a shame she didn’t say it.
The missed opportunities of the small moments. It made me realize that we haven’t seen Liesel tell her mother that she loves her, and I desperately hope that this isn’t foreshadowing for some awful moment to come.
The vast majority of chapter sixty-seven is Zusak’s inclusion of bits and pieces of Max’s book, The Word Shaker, and the full text of the titular story. He starts off describing some of the sketches and brief stories and it’s then that I know I am thankful that he normally includes that actual drawings and writings themselves. I want to read The Word Shaker from cover to cover. Thankfully, we do get all of “The Word Shaker” itself, placed after stories about the basement and Max’s family.
Liesel–I almost scribbled this story out. I thought you might be too old for such a tale, but maybe no one is. I thought of you and your books and words, and this strange story came into my head. I hope you can find some good in it.
Surprisingly, the story of “The Word Shaker” is Max’s version of a fairy tale, inserting both Liesel and himself into all of it. Dedicated to the power Liesel’s words have had over Max’s life, it’s a tale of how words can save people just as much as they can harm them.
He opens the story with visual references to the Führer:
There was once a strange, small man. He decided three important details about his life:
- He would part his hair from the opposite side to everyone else.
- He would make himself a small, strange mustache.
- He would one day rule the world.
Using these visual cues, Max almost…disassociates from the reality of it? It’s not to say that Max doesn’t understand what he’s doing or that the’s hiding the true terror of this man from anyone. I was impressed with the way that you could take this out of this book and it still seemed like an actual fairy tale based solely on one man’s imagination.
But that would be disingenuous to what this story is. As Max chronicles this “strange, small man” on his path towards world domination, he also recognizes exactly how he came to hide in the basement of 33 Himmel Street for twenty-two months: Words.
It’s simplistic, yes, but it’s because of the focus that Max chooses to use here to make a point:
Yes, the Führer decided that he would rule the world with words. “I will never fire a gun,” he devised. “I will not have to.” Still, he was not rash. Let’s allow him at least that much. He was not a stupid man at all. His first plan of attack was to plant the words in as many areas of his homeland as possible.
While Max doesn’t ever openly talk about the propaganda used to control the tide of the German republic, he doesn’t need to. He knows from experience how words and ideas were used against him to control how people felt simply because he was one specific word–“Jew”–and why that word was an evil, dirty thing.
He watched them grow, until eventually, great forests of words had risen throughout Germany …. It was a nation of farmed thoughts.
I love that Max chooses to use the visual metaphor of a forest here. Words like this are grown in a specific manner, and it fits that he would use trees like this. It also allows him to extrapolate this extended metaphor to use the concept of a production line that dumps thoughts into the German citizens, making them pre-packaged victims of Words.
(Question: Are the sketches/drawings in your copies of the book really, really small? They are so tiny in my Kindle version that I can’t really make them out that well, which is why I’m not commenting on them. TRAGEDY.)
Max elaborates on the idea of a word shaker in this tale: as more and more words are needed by the Führer, people are employed to climb into the trees and throw them down from the branches. But not just anyone could be a word shaker:
The best word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker in her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words.
And this is when the story takes a turn for the gut-wrenching, not because the content of any of this is sad. It’s not in the slightest. It’s the context we all know that breaks my heart, because we know that Max was without words when he first came to that basement on 33 Himmel Street, and Liesel gave them to him. This collection would not exist without her. I know that if it wasn’t for the library, for certain teachers, for the occasional friend who would mention a book off-hand, and even for my mother, I would not be typing these words for anyone else to read either. That thought is really comforting to me.
One day, however, she met a man who was despised by her homeland, even though he was born in it. They became good friends, and when the man was sick, the word shaker allowed a single teardrop to fall on his face. The tear was made of friendship–a single word–and it dried and became a seed, and when the girl was in the forest, she planted that seed among the other trees. She watered it every day.
It’s at this point that I felt the bumps rise on my skin, completely emotionally taken by this story and my ability to relate to it, and this fairy tale stops being some imaginary story about people who never existed, and I know that for a lot of people, myself included, and perhaps even you, words have transformed lives into something more. This “tale” is about recognizing how this young girl has given Max a power he will never forget.
The “tree” in the story begins to grow until it’s the tallest in the forest, gaining the attention of the Führer, who orders that it be cut down. When the young word shaker begs him not to, he ignores her pleas and continues with the plan. Highlighting Liesel’s unending bravery, Max writes the young girl up into the tree, to the highest branches, anxiously awaiting the moment the tree would fall so she could fall with it.
But to everyone’s surprise, no one can make a dent in the tree. A second man tries to cut it down.
Days passed.
Weeks took over.
A hundred and ninety-six soldiers could not make any impact on the word shaker’s tree.
Amazing. Just unbelievable. It’s a literal metaphor for the power of Liesel’s words.
The seasons come and go and finally, the people below give up, telling the word shaker that she has won and that she can come down from the tree. But she remains:
“NO thank you,” she said, for she knew that it was only herself who was holding the tree upright.
But then another man comes to visit, this one much more tired than the rest, his “bag [looking] too heavy for him,” and I struggled to guess what this could mean. The people of Germany tell this man that the word shaker will not come down, that his efforts are futile, but he surprises them all when he pulls out a hammer. A hammer!
Driving nails into the tree, he climbs up to join the word shaker, and I then realize this last man is meant to be Max, the man who spawned this entire tree, and it made my throat constrict in that familiar way, because he was writing in their reunion, almost as if he knew they’d be separated. And I just missed Max, and I wished he didn’t have to leave 33 Himmel Street and take Max and Alex with him.
The story ends as the two of them finally leave the tree and it begins to show the marks of all the destruction the people had given it. It falls to the earth, cutting a path through the forest that is miles long.
But as they walked on, they stopped several times, to listen. They thought they could hear voices and words behind them, on the word shaker’s tree.
It’s a poetic end to a story, and as Liesel reflects on the weight of it all, wondering where Max might be “in all that forest out there.”
It was hours later, when she woke up, that the answer to her question came. “Of course,” she whispered. “Of course I know where he is,” and she went back to sleep.
She dreamed of the tree.
MY GODDAMN CREYS.
CH. 68: THE ANARCHIST’S SUIT COLLECTION
Christmas Eve arrives in Molching, and the Steiners ask Rosa, Trudy (I FORGOT ABOUT HER), and Liesel over to have one large Christmas celebration, since the fathers are gone. Liesel, completely entranced with The Word Shaker and the gift that Max Vandenberg has given her, is inspired to pass on the sensation to someone else: Rudy Steiner.
Rudy’s familiar bitter humor bites back at Liesel’s claim that she has a gift for him. Well…will have a gift for him. He correctly senses that she wants to procure something by stealing, and the thought is just too intriguing to him.
“Do you have the key?” she asked.
“The key to what?” But it didn’t take Rudy long to understand. He made his way inside and returned not long after. In the words of Viktor Chemmel, he said, “It’s time to go shopping.”
I didn’t pick up on this clue until it was spelled out for me, but I also wasn’t aware there was still stuff inside of Alex Steiner’s store. Like all of Rudy and Liesel’s stealing adventures, things start off a little rough, and Rudy’s sense of humor is there to break the tension:
In the middle of the exchange, Liesel tripped on a bump in the floor. A mannequin follwed her down. It groped her arm and dismantled in its clothes on top of her. “Get this thing off me!” It was in four pieces. The torso and head, the legs, and two separate arms. When she was rid of it, Liesel stood and wheezed. “Jesus, Mary.”
Rudy found one of the arms and tapped her on the shoulder with its hand. When she turned in fright, he extended it in friendship. “Nice to meet you.”
Ugh, I want to be best friends with Rudy. Seriously!
They continued slowly in the dark store before Rudy finally decides to run out of the store and return with a lantern from the church. Thievery to assist their thievery. I love it. He demands that Liesel show him what this “gift” is for him. She begins to cycle through the suits hanging near her until she finds a navy blue one, holding it in front of Rudy.
Her gift is a suit for Rudy, whose clothes are always torn and filthy. Bless her heart.
After trying it on and trading some of his expected banter with Liesel, he lunges toward her for some reason, tripping over the mannequin pieces and landing on the floor.
Liesel rushed over.
She crouched above him
Kiss him, Liesel, kiss him.
“Are you all right, Rudy? Rudy?”
AHHH LIESEL, JUST DO IT!
“I miss him,” said the boy, sideways, across the floor.
“Frohe Weihnachten,” Liesel replied. She helped him up, straightening the suit. “Merry Christmas.”
I have a feeling this is the last Christmas they’ll ever spend together. Oh boy.
The images in my e-book were fine, except for the very last one, which was disproportionately huge. One thing is that there was obviously no attempt to preserve the formatting of the text and image alignment in my e-book, which makes me sad because it was really well done on the physical pages. So…
Raw images from "The Hidden Sketchbook": http://www.photobucket.com/sketchbookimages
And because of the weird formatting in the e-book I have, I decided to type out the pages in the correct format. The font used is definitely different from the one used in the physical book (which is more like a handwritten script that might even have been custom-made for this book, like the title and page number font is). The alignment is a lot closer to what it is in the physical book, though it's definitely still not the same. I just found and corrected a typo on one of the pages, so there are probably bound to be more. Anyway, here it is: http://www.photobucket.com/sketchbooktext
(Question: Are the sketches/drawings in your copies of the book really, really small? They are so tiny in my Kindle version that I can’t really make them out that well, which is why I’m not commenting on them. TRAGEDY.)
They're not tiny, but they're small in comparison to the illustrations for The Standover Man. Remind me and I'll show you on Saturday.
I really don't have anything profound to say other than to just gush about what I love about this book.
I loved The Word Shaker and the illustrations (FWIW, I thought the pictures in my Nook version were big enough). Like you Mark, I loved the metaphor about the power of words because I've loved reading and writing since I was a kid. That metaphor is also why "The Shakespeare Code" is one of my favorite episodes of "Doctor Who."
I loved that Max showed how words could be used for both good and evil. Actually, I love that this book is all about showing the best and the worst of humanity. So many times I've read books or seen movies that are so fixated on how terrible the human race is and I want to yell out that there are people doing very good things and they far outweigh the number of horrible people (just seems like the horrible people are better at getting all the attention). Sure, we have our Hitlers and other people doing awful things to each other just for a bit of power – but on the other hand, we have our Liesels and Maxes who are just trying to help each other through life and make the experience as positive as they can for one another. I haven't finished it yet, but I can honestly say that The Book Thief is the best book I've read in a long, long time and I'm so happy that Mark Reads brought it to my attention.
One of the things I love most about the Mark Reads phenomenon is the comments. Your last paragraph = everything I wanted to say that I hadn't figured out yet. 🙂
Kiss him, Liesel, kiss him.
Death, you know my brain. This was my exact thought a second before I read that sentence. I was so sure she would. And then she didn't. 🙁
The Word Shaker was awesome. I just finished reading a book of fairy tales and was still in a fairy tale mood when I came to that part of the book. It was nice to see all the ways it resembles any other fairy tale or folk story while still being a unique story about Max and Liesel. I do hope they have that reunion eventually. And that he's okay and doesn't die in the war.
Books are magical. I could probably go on forever, but I'll just leave it at that. Books (stories, plays, poems, songs, novels, short stories, etc) are magical
Magical is the perfect word. They create worlds, people, creatures! The power to do that is definitely magic.
One thing is that this chapter (if I remember correctly) provides the first actual sample of Rosa and Liesel having a completely loving and affectionate interaction. The moment when Liesel is given two books for Christmas, Rosa doesn't even speak except to tell Liesel where they got the money for the gift, and even this can be read as another excuse for her to throw insults at her husband. The moment Rosa tells Liesel she's sorry about her biological mother was immediately after having given Liesel a beating. And he moment when she comes to the school to tell Liesel that Max is perfectly fine (please let him still be fine), she has to pretend to be scolding her for something she didn't really do. Even when it's obvious that Rosa loves Liesel and is looking out for her, it generally comes with a heaping side of saumensch and rawhide.
In the last chapter, though, we get Liesel playing a note on the accordion (as opposed to how Rosa interacted with it), and then it's said that "Rosa had been right. It only made the room feel emptier." I guess this could just be Death's statement of Rosa's unspoken purpose behind holding the accordion without playing it, but I'd like to think of it as an actual indication that this is something Rosa said to Liesel, directly acknowledging both Hans' absence and their pain. Though I suppose that if that's the case, it's a little disappointing that we didn't get to see it played out more explicitly.
At any rate, it's wonderful that we get a moment of pure unambiguous tenderness between the two, given how Rosa is usually portrayed.
Seriously, guys, if I went back to school, I would be a paper-writing machine. Maybe I should just do that as a job for shitty college students.
You could, but they'd probably pay you in gifs.
I don't really have anything to add about The Word Shaker. Assuring Liesel that words are powerful, and that she in turn is powerful because she can manipulate and understand words, is the best gift that Max could give her. Not using words, like "I love you" to Rosa, can also have just as large an impact as the ones you do use.
I love how these two chapters work with each other. Zusak juxtaposes the power of words said and unsaid, and actions taken and not taken. You're satisfied by the the gifts, but you regret what Liesel hasn't done.
The Word Shaker really made me think back to the beginning of this book; how Liesel couldn't even read. She was embarrassed by it and teased. It's amazing how far she's come and what words have done for her alone.
It also reminds me of when I fell in love with reading. I used to climb up into my favorite tree in our yard and read for what seemed like hours. It was my favorite reading spot. Chapter 67 brought me back to those memories that I hadn't thought of in years.
How do I love this book, let me count the ways…..
The emphasis on things Liesel doesn't do (tell Rosa she loves her, kiss Rudy) makes me think it's foreshadowing the fact that they will not be possible much longer. Seriously, there is so much to dread in this book.
@Mark, my ebook pictures are tiny as well. Thanks very much to Mauve_Avenger for posting them! Also, I can't seem to figure out what Liesel means by "Of course I know where he is". I feel like I've missed something incredibly obvious, but my brain doesn't seem to be working properly today.
At first, I was also feeling like I really missed something. But then I came around to an idea.
What I think Liesel means is that Max is right there in the pages of The Word Shaker. In all that time he was hiding, he put himself into this homemade book, and was inspired to do so by Liesel's love and use of words. So even if she never sees him again or never knows what happened to him, she does have a piece of him, that he gifted her.
This is even better than "He is in her heart". I'll pretend that this was my second thougth and you only beat me for some minutes.
That's a beautiful idea! 🙂 I do hope he's still actually alive somewhere physical, too. Clearly I'm too literal-minded when I have a headache… I automatically thought "I missed a coded message or some inside joke in the Word Shaker that tells Liesel his hiding place!?"
OK, you win everything. First time I've burst into tears at a comment.
Oh God, this just makes me remember this and makes me even more depressed than before. 🙁
Mark Reads =Word Shaker. I read a lot of reviews, blogs, give book talks, in a couple of book groups. Mark Reads is one of my favorite places. Personal insight and point of view, when used judiciously, expand and enrich the whole experience. This is an open but safe site and it gives people words. You can use Marks, other commentors or you can use your own.
I am awed by daily posts that do not seem forced or faked. Comments that address the topic and mood.
I just like it here. Plus I get to relive the "First Time" all over again.
This. I love this community. First of all, books are great on their own, but they become even better when you have someone to share them with, someone who you can discuss all the characters and plot and question the decisions or just gush over how surprising everything was. This site takes that experience a few exponentials higher. Previously much of my fandom discussion was over on livejournal, and I still spend time there, but I like this community because I do get to have that experience of seeing new things, even on series I'm well familiar with. There's so many people seeing the show/book for the first time, and they sometimes point out things I never considered or remind me how awesome that experience was.
I've also read The Book Thief and seen Sherlock, just to follow along with the blog. Both were excellent, and I don't think I'd have looked at them without that influence.
I haven't been commenting as much on the Book Thief, mostly just because its… I don't know, it's such a hard book to discuss. You really have to just experience it. But I enjoy seeing the comments others leave.
Mark, it’s amazing what can happen when you stare at an empty page for fifteen minutes. I’m so gratefull that you made me read this book, and I want to thank everybody who recommended it to you.
Therer are more important points to comment on, but others expressed my feelings better than I can do, so I’ll tell you the specific reason why this first paragraph made me shiver (if for nobody else, then this is for Idwy).
My fathers family didn’t trust the fragile shelter of a basement. You may think the miners would have felt more comfortable than the people in the Fiedler’s shelter, because they were used to be underground, but their families weren’t, and to a miner no basement may seem deep enough. So my father learned to run out of town when he heared the sirens, to hide in the wild.
Well, there is no real wilderness in Germany, but this was neither Big City nor the Coal Pot, just a small mining town in a rural environment. So people waited in the fields, heared the stream of planes cross the sky and watched the distant light-bulbs that illuminated the targets (called christmas trees for some reason my father cold never explain). Obviously it never occured to them that a bombing could be as inaccurate as the second raid of Munich, where “most of the bombs fell in open country”.
Wow, it's so scary to think of people outside anywhere during an air raid. But I think I can understand the idea that a basement would never feel sufficient to a miner.
Mark,
You say the pictures are small in your Kindle – couldn't you look at them on your iPad? I think you can join the iPad and Kindle accounts so that you get all the same books. I've downloaded the Kindle soft to my PC, iPad and iPhone and it syncs nicely between all the devices. And the Word Shaker pics look ok on both my iPad and PC.
I can't really say much, but yeah, Word Shaker. Am cry. 🙁 I miss Max.
I was willing Liesel to kiss Rudy at the end of the chapter. And like you, I was worried that when Liesel didn't tell Rosa she loved her, it was foreshadowing that time is running out and she may not ever get to tell her that. I hope I'm wrong.
P.S. The pictures were really small on my Nook also!
I tried to decipher the words on the sketches, but didn’t fully succeed.
From “The Führer Shop” (first image):
The Führer’s (Handbook)?
…? moustaches …?
Hatred
Fear
Free delivery
Sale
From the forrest (fourth image):
(Jew)? (or Tea, but this doesn’t seem plausible)
Hate
Bot…?
Hatred
(Rigate)? (is this a word?)
Fear
and many swastikas
There are no more words, but again many swastikas in the next to last sketch.
On the first page, it says "small moustaches 1/2 price"
On the second, from front to back, the words "RECLAIM" and "RIGHT" are being poured into the people's heads.
On the fourth, it does look like "Tea," or even "Jea," but I assume it's supposed to be "Jew." The others that aren't clear are "BOYCOTT" (it winds weirdly) and "RIGHT."
You got everything else, though!
Thank you.
The Word Shaker… amazing. Oh, Max…
My copy of The Book Thief was due back at the library, so I had to finish the rest of it in one go, starting at A Long Walk to Dachau. Do not attempt to do this on the bus. I was just lucky that the person who was sitting next to me got off and no one else on my school bus looks around or talks very much. The Word Shaker was when I started to cry. People, just gonna warn you now: get some tissues 'cause YOU ARE NOT PREPARED. (I don't consider this a spoiler because we all know that Rudy is going to die, which is of course IMMENSELY HEARTBREAKING AND SAD because he is an amazing character. But feel free to delete this comment if it is.)
Dear Markus Zusak,
Why do you make me want to hug you and hunt you down at the same time? The Word Shaker was beautiful, and this whole darn book is beautiful.
A book all about the beauty and danger and power of the spoken word… and yet I am made pretty much speechless by it.
"Of course these people will never know me. I don’t play a single part of their novels. But it’s the closest I’ll come to a spiritual experience, and it’s the closest I’ll come to feeling like I’m not alone."
I'm not sure why, but this made me want to cry, Mark.
The power of words is so underestimated. After an abusive childhood, it's only now, in my 30s, that I'm seeing the lies that abuse left written deep in my heart, and its words that are helping me rewrite those lies and realise I'm not the piece of crap that, deep inside, I thought I was for the longest time. The metaphor is so beautiful. It still stuns me how fabulous this book is – and stuns me how anyone can NOT like it…