{"id":276,"date":"2011-04-01T07:00:42","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=276"},"modified":"2011-03-31T20:41:48","modified_gmt":"2011-04-01T03:41:48","slug":"mark-reads-the-book-thief-chapters-22-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2011\/04\/mark-reads-the-book-thief-chapters-22-23\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads ‘The Book Thief’: Chapters 22-23"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the twenty-second and twenty-third chapters of The Book Thief<\/em>, Death takes us far away from Molching to give us hints towards Hans\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work during World War II, and Liesel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life becomes a bit more interesting. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read The Book Thief.<\/em><\/p>\n

Author’s Note: <\/strong>Ok, I fucked this up. I labeled my files completely wrong and posted the review that comes after this yesterday. I apologize for pushing these out in the wrong order. Here’s chapters 22 and 23. After today, I’ll put them back in the correct order chronologically, but I wanted this to be the first review this morning. I AM SORRY!!! I will do my best to make sure this doesn’t happen again!<\/p>\n

CH. 22: ENTER THE STRUGGLER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, this book just got a whole lot more intriguing to me.<\/p>\n

Death takes the entirety of chapter twenty-two to take the narrative hundreds of miles away from the lives of Liesel, the Hubermanns, and the Steiners, to some place of pain and suffering. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unnamed (in terms of a city or town) and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a concentration camp either. Zusak purposely leaves it vague, as I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure he has plans to explain this at a later point. There has to be a reason he would introduce this side character at this moment in the book as well, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather talk about what actually happens here.<\/p>\n

I know that for some of you, the style is a bit grating, and I admit that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to get used to. For me, though, I find that Zusak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s style is a fantastic addition to the story he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s telling. The choppy lines, the visual prose, the constant asides from Death\u00e2\u20ac\u201dall of these contribute in positive ways to the plot being laid down in The Book Thief<\/em>. In this chapter, that specific style seems to rear its head most obviously than any of the others. The passages of terror and confusion being experienced by this specific Jewish man, Max, are riddled with some of Zusak\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best metaphors and imagery:<\/p>\n

He had eaten only the foul taste of his own hungry breath for what felt like weeks, and still, nothing. Occasionally voices wandered past and sometimes he longed for them to knuckle the door, to open it, to drag him out, into the unbearable light. For now, he could only sit on his suitcase couch, hands under his chin, his elbows burning his thighs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Chilling. Honestly one of the more unsettling things he has written. But who is this man? Why is his confinement of the solitary nature? Who is he waiting for?<\/p>\n
Just leave everything as it is, at all cost. It might be time to go soon. Light like a gun. Explosive to the eyes. It might be time to go. It might be time, so wake up. Wake up now, Goddamn it! Wake up!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What impresses me about Zusak is that in just a few sentences, he can communicate what you could easily spend a novel on. The urgency here is conveyed via these short, repetitive sentences, like bursts of the gun referenced when he talks about light. It also gives the feeling that this place is so dark that light is literally painful to Max.<\/p>\n
When Max is visited, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s by someone whose motivations are unspoken, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a friend of Max. So I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in a prison of any kind. This stranger is too friendly, too comfortable to be in a position of power like this. The stranger brings max an identity card inside of a book. (Books are very important in this novel for multiple reasons, now. Must remember that.) Inside the book is a key. To what, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know, but the stranger also mentions \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the map.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d After giving him a small bit of food, he leaves. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be back in a few days,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he tells Max.<\/p>\n
I still have no idea where Max is or what has happened to them. Zusak is giving no answers. Instead, he focuses on a segment where Max eats for the first time in a very, very long time, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a detailed and terrifying moment that is further proof of his talent as a writer.<\/p>\n
Again, he set two aside and devoured the third. The noise was astounding. Surely, the F\u00c3\u00bchrer<\/em> himself could hear the sound of the orange crush in his mouth. It broke his teeth with every bite. When he drank, he was quite positive that he was swallowing them. Next time, he advised himself, drink first.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Like before, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very short, but speaks volumes about this man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s terrifying and traumatic experience. The real twist, though, comes right after this, when Max picks up the book the stranger left:<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Please,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Please.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
He was speaking to a man he had never met. As well as a few other important details, he knew the man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name. Hans Hubermann. Again, he spoke to him, to the distant stranger. He pleaded.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Please.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What the fuck???? Ok, so we know Hans had an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153idea\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when he went to go trade to get his copy of Mein Kampf<\/em>. Is that the book Max is holding in his hand? What does the book do? Ugh I want to know EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW.<\/p>\n
CH. 23: THE ATTRIBUTES OF SUMMER<\/strong><\/p>\n
In contrast to the brevity of chapter twenty-two, chapter twenty-three feels like the longest chapter in the entire book, understandably so once you read about all that happens to Liesel that summer of 1940. (Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t she close to being with the Hubermanns for a year now?)<\/p>\n
Death outlines the four major areas that Liesel deals with that summer, starting with her quest to read all of The Shoulder Shrug<\/em>. Finally, we get more information about this book and why Hans insisted that Liesel and him keep that book a secret:<\/p>\n
The authorities\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 problem with the book was obvious. The protagonist was a Jew, and he was presented in a positive light. Unforgivable. He was a rich man who was tired of letting life pass him by\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhat he referred to as the shrugging of the shoulders to the problems and pleasures of a person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time on earth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
WELL, THAT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S NOT TOO NAZI-FRIENDLY. Hans was smart to make Liesel keep this a secret. On a more positive note, though, Liesel realizes the joy inherent in reading, how words can communicate sensations and feelings that are so terrifically realistic:<\/p>\n
In the early part of summer in Molching, as Liesel and Papa made their way through the book, this man was traveling to Amsterdam on business, and the snow was shivering outside. The girl loved that\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe shivering snow. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exactly what it does when it comes down,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she told Hands Hubermann.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Well, this does feel kind of meta. Again, sometimes I feel like some of you recommended me this book specifically because of passages like this. AND I DEEPLY LOVE YOU FOR IT.<\/p>\n
Liesel, thankfully, also continues to go to Ilsa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house to spend time in the mayor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s library, which surprisingly causes the two of them to start to grow closer.<\/p>\n
The mayor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wife, having let the girl in for the fourth time, was sitting at the desk, simply watching the books. On the second visit, she had given permission for Liesel to pull one out and go through it, which led to another and another, until up to a half a dozen books were stuck to her, either clutched beneath her arm or among the pile that was climbing higher in her remaining hand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
God, THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL. This is how I consumed books as a child. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d pile them up around me and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read the back portion and maybe the first few pages of each one before I committed to that specific book. UGH MARKUS ZUSAK, HOW DO YOU KNOW MY LIFE SO WELL.<\/p>\n
That specific summer of 1940 was key to Liesel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s growth as a reader and a writer. (Well, unless Death is just a total liar, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m inclined to trust him as a narrator at this point.) She memorizes specific passages to ask her father about them and reads so many portions of so many books that later in her life, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unable to remember exactly what<\/em> she read during that summer.<\/p>\n
When Liesel finds a picture book with a boy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name written on the inside cover (Johann Hermann), she can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t resist asking her who it is.<\/p>\n
The woman looked beside her, somewhere next to the girl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s knees.<\/p>\n
Liesel apologized. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sorry. I shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be asking such things\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d She let the sentence die its own death.<\/p>\n
The woman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face did not alter, yet somehow she managed to speak. He is nothing now in this world,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she explained. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He was my\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Her son. Lost in the first World War, according to death, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153parceled up in barbed wire,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he says.<\/p>\n
High above the earth, we sank together, to our knees. It was just another day, 1918.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I love that this suggests the normalcy of this kind of death at the end of the war. For Ilsa Hermann, however, it came to define the rest of her life, having chosen to succumb to the grief and suffering, causing her to be exactly who she is, robed and standing in the mayor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s library, her face written with sadness and pain. Therefore it makes no sense to her when Liesel, on her way out that afternoon, turns and says she is sorry to Ilsa. For what? What is there left to be sorry for?<\/p>\n
For Liesel, though, the joy of reading distracts her from this moment:<\/p>\n
Once, words had rendered Liesel useless, but now, when she sat on the floor, with the mayor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wife at her husband\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s desk, she felt an innate sense of power. It happened every time she deciphered a new word or pieced together a sentence.<\/p>\n
She was a girl.<\/p>\n
In Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
How fitting that she was discovering the power of words.<\/p>\n
How fitting indeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The third thing Liesel dealt with during the summer of 1940 was street soccer, but more specifically Tommy M\u00c3\u00bcller, the kid Liesel beat up for merely smiling at her. Liesel does feel some guilt for causing Tommy to be so deathly afraid of her (and justifiably so), but we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see many attempts on her end to rectify the situation, aside from taking a few shifts as goalie in Tommy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s place.<\/p>\n
The final key event of summer in the year 1940 is when Rudy Steiner discovered that he could steal. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ironic, given that Liesel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life has changed (and for the better, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d say) because she also learned that she could steal. For Rudy, his own unending hunger motivates his desire for and future obsession with stealing. Both families are experiencing the negative effects of the economy at war, and neither of them seem to complain.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when they spot an older boy, Fritz Hammer, eating an apple do they begin to pursue something dangerous, foolish, and totally exhilarating. After trying to get him to tell them where he got it from, he instead is followed to a spot upstream on the Amper River, where Rudy and Liesel meet a group of older boys who immediately begin to size them up.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m starving,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Rudy replied.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153And he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fast,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Liesel.<\/p>\n
Berg looked at her. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t recall asking for your opinion.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He was teenage tall and had a long neck. Pimples were gathered in peer groups on his face. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But I like you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He was friendly, in a smart-mouth adolescent way. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t this the one who beat up your brother, Anderl?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Word had certainly made its way around. A good hiding transcends the divides of age.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And so Liesel gets accepted into the gang for being a BAMF and Rudy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s participation in the Jesse Owens incident gets him inducted as well. Utilizing burlap sacks to get across barbed wire, that afternoon the group of boys and their young recruits head to a farm to steal apples.<\/p>\n
Liesel was more specific. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve stolen two books,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at which Arthur laughed, in three short snorts. His pimples shifted position.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t eat books, sweetheart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Hey Arthur, I bet nothing you ever stole and hid on her personage was ever LITERALLY ON FIRE. How\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that for your smug condescension?<\/p>\n
While Liesel doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem at all concerned about her past with theft, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just not anywhere near as sure about stealing apples from a farm. Regardless of how she feels, Rudy peer pressures her into coming along. Thankfully, they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get caught, but I wondered how this event would play into her own future. Would she begin to steal books more rapidly if she knew how easy theft was? Would she branch out into stealing things besides apples?<\/p>\n
At least for the moment, there are no real problems created by this, aside from upset stomachs. Between the two of them, Liesel and Rudy are given a dozen apples. Afraid that bringing them home will just cause too much suspicion and too many questions, they eat all of the apples in one sitting. THAT IS A LOT OF APPLE.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for Liesel, all that food causes her to throw up that night. Rosa is of course upset at this, but Liesel doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell her what really happened.<\/p>\n
She said nothing.<\/p>\n
The apples, she thought happily. The apples, and she vomited one more time, for good luck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
On that note, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll end this review with a small prediction. That luck is going to run out soon.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the twenty-second and twenty-third chapters of The Book Thief, Death takes us far away from Molching to give us hints towards Hans\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work during World War II, and Liesel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life becomes a bit more interesting. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[23,46,45,44],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-book-thief","tag-mark-reads","tag-mark-reads-the-book-thief","tag-markus-zusak","tag-the-book-thief-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}