Liam Roberts
A laugh-out-loud comedy and heartbreaking tragedy wrapped up in one, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is told in a deeply original narrative voice in assured prose. I struggle to imagine how Stambach achieved writing this, his debut (!), in his spare time while teaching. An excellent first novel from a very talented writer indeed.
Read my full review: https://t.co/7EGfioFdxe
Reading reviews of A Man in Love, the second instalment in Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard's highly acclaimed My Struggle series, I've seen a number of reviewers grappling with why this series has become such a global phenomenon. In Norway, one book has been sold for every nine adults in the country. Since international translations have proliferated, the books have been welcomed with open arms and glowing reviews in every territory they have entered. This is a remarkable feat for a series that is more than 3,600 pages long and meticulously describes the life of a forty-year-old Norwegian writer. The first book, entitled A Death in the Family, describes the teenager years of the series' protagonist, Karl Ove. It is a book of firsts: first love, first experiences with alcohol, first bands, first intimate experience of death. A Man in Love whizzes forward a decade or two and opens with Karl Ove trying to deal with his recent separation from ex-wife Tonje. He has packed his bags and decided to start his life afresh in Sweden, where he meets and falls in love with a writer named Linda. On a writer's retreat, Karl Ove opts to get hopelessly drunk and admits his feelings to Linda in an emotional outburst, only to be knocked back by Linda who actually fancies Karl's friend. In response, Karl Ove returns to his cabin, continues drinking and decides to self-mutilate, slashing his face to ribbons with shards of broken glass.
Read my full review here: http://wp.me/p6dHAE-cw
Set across three time periods, the book explores the power of art to effect and change the course of people's lives throughout the ages. The novel is written in stylish prose and has been well researched by the author who provides rich, detailed portrayals of the art of forgery and 17th century Dutch life. I would recommend this if you enjoyed Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with a Peal Earring, and/or historical fiction.
Read my full review and let me know your thoughts here: http://wp.me/p6dHAE-bg
A gorgeous insight into Tripolitan life told from the perspective of the inquisitive Hadachinou. His incisive inspection of a society entangled in rich traditions and a complex history makes the reader question the values which form the anchor of this community where violence and secrets are rife. As well as coming to terms with his surroundings, young Hadachinou is also dealing with his own coming-of-age (the fitting title of the Peirene series of which this is part of) with the eruptions of rudimentary urges and questions of his own identity. A lovely capture of life ‘Under the Tripoli Sky' told in a rich poetic style captured magnificently by translator Adriana Hunter. Congratulations to Peirene for championing such wonderful literature!
A sublime piece of fiction that tackles many preconceived ideas about race in the twenty-first century plus themes of identity, home, religion and different cultures. These themes are addressed through genuinely compelling and realistic characters who everybody in the twenty-first century, regardless of race, religion, age or culture, will be able to identify with on one level or another. Another modern classic on 4th Estate's backlist.
A brutal dissection of capitalist America which takes place at its very heart - on New York's Wall Street. It can be hilariously funny, hideously repulsive and stomach wrenching, painfully hard-hitting, emotionally draining, but it is constantly well-written and well-structured. I think it is probably a five-star novel but the bitter after-taste of the novel tricked me into giving it four. A modern classic
An admirable collection of short stories which paints a vivid, disturbing and horrific depiction of a fragmented Iraq whose war wounds are exposed forthrightly by Blasim. At the same time many of the stories are bordering on the surreal, involving magic, mysteries and beguiling symbolism, rendering the stories extremely thought provoking and often giving them a discomforting quality for the reader. My first furrow into Iraqi literature left me intrigued, wanted more and it is a collection that is definitely to be read and re-read. It is also great to see a publisher in the North West championing such exquisite literature.
A stunning novel. The plot may be slow moving, not THAT much does happen considering the novel's breadth, but ‘The Little Friend' is a glorious celebration and you can't help but admire and enjoy the maturity of Tartt's craft. Harriet, for me, carries on in the vein of the characters that appear in Tartt's previous novel ‘The Secret History' as dark, inquisitive, intriguing and I felt Tartt's depiction of Harriet's wrangling with the event that precedes the novel's events is interesting and most probably quite accurate for a girl of Harriet's insatiable disposition. I also love Harriet's bookishness and the way Tartt has the narratives of Harriet's book tie-in to her consciousness, showing the importance of literature in shaping a child's world outlook, which, as in Harriet's case, is able to mature (if not become quite a mess!). Can't wait to read ‘The Goldfinch'!
Originally Published at: http://bit.ly/1oN0ZAn
In the opening pages of The Secret History Donna Tartt, the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize winning The Goldfinch, launches her reader into the scene of a murder. But it's not quite your conventional murder, as a group of classics students perform the pre-meditated, tactical demise of one of their own. Where would a band of Ancient Greek-loving geeks find the necessity to callously eliminate a close friend during a chilly Vermont night? This question comprises the first ‘Book' of Tartt's debut novel, as Richard Papen delivers an autobiographical narrative detailing his departure from his Californian homeland to the verdant pastures of Vermont and how he found himself in the class of Julian Morrow, the novel's idiosyncratic, highly intelligent professor, and his band of peculiar disciples.
Henry, Charles, Camilla, Francis and Bunny are an eccentric yet thoroughly intriguing bunch who, for me, are The Secret History's main strength. I found each character to be multi-layered, fascinatingly complex and the fluctuations and mutations of their relationships manage to captivate the reader's imagination over the novel's 559 pages – which is no mean feat. The complexity of their individual personalities makes it nigh impossible to second guess their next move, giving the novel a certain unpredictability and intrigue. The novel's breadth is undoubtedly due to Tartt's realist description of the everyday lives of Richard and co; their noses incessantly poking into some Greek or Latin text, weekend trips to Francis' country cottage, card games accompanied by scotch swirled around to the click of the ice cubes. For me, it was beguiling to observe the minutiae of the lives of these characters, ostensibly depicted by Tartt as affluent & intellectual free spirits, in the same way I enjoy reading about the lives of precocious geniuses like Arthur Rimbaud. For some readers, on the other hand, these characters may be ‘snobby, greedy, amoral, pretentious, melodramatic, and selfish', a creation of Tartt's elitist fantasies, and it is fair to imagine that if you do strongly resent these characters, you may find The Secret History a tiresome novel. But like or dislike them, they are truly thought-provoking fictional creations who are worth getting to know firstly for the debate they are capable of sparking but also for the quality of Tartt's prose which is consistently brilliant. Here are a couple of examples of Tartt's ability:
“The walls had fallen away and the room was black. Henry's face, lit starkly by the lamp, was pale against the darkness and stray points of light winked from the rim of his spectacles, glowed in the amber depths of his whiskey glass, shone blue in his eyes.” P.152
“After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.” P.45
Tartt often describes the vigour of youth in such tender terms and I enjoyed the floral, purple qualities of her prose. For me, The Secret History exists in its own fictitious epoch, outside of the ostensible 1980s setting, which is a collage-like creation of Tartt's imagination depicting her rather romantic vision of a fantastically intellectual American university lifestyle.
It must also be noted that The Secret History contains numerous elements which might be deemed ‘perverse' or simply weird by certain readers. Murder, incest, Dionysian rituals, pill thieving and drug taking are but a few of the elements of Tartt's creation. Yet I felt that these elements are essential parts of the fabric of this novel, as one which almost eroticizes literary or mythical ideals, while at the same time offering a nostalgia for a sort of semi-fantasized past of cult-like classes of students of idiosyncratic taste, who quote Homer and Plato at will but would be dumbfounded at the modernity of an ATM machine.
Anachronistic? Probably. Idealistic? Certainly. But Tartt's novel is a riveting, gorgeous piece of prose which, in many ways, strangely portrays a slowed down, simplified vision of life that many of us yearn to revert to today (a scroll through Tumblr seems to attest to this fact). It is hard to imagine somebody today who would pass their night-time in ways such as this: “Quietly, I put the bottle on my desk, got a book, and left. Then I went to Dr. Roland's office, where I lay reading on the couch with my jacket thrown over me until the sun came up, and I turned off the lamp and went to sleep”. This heedless, liberating comfort of youth seems like an idealised, distant past when the modern teenager is entangled in the web of social networks and snowed under the pressures of modern life. But Tartt's novel serves to remind us that life is simple, that we should revel in the beauty of life's minutiae instead of becoming engulfed in the masses of information and pressure that oppress us in the 21st century.
When David Mercier, a mid-level accountant whose Parisian life has seemingly plateaued, decides to make the most of his wife and son's trip to Brittany by treating himself to a bachelor, brasserie dinner of oysters, the only alterations he anticipates are those to his bank balance and his belt. But just as he has finished scouring the menu and handing in his order, in strolls le Président de la République François Mitterrand who takes his seat just beside Monsieur Mercier, leaving his aghast. After eating, when Monsieur Mitterrand forgets his hat, Mercier is left with the perfect opportunity to nab a memento from his new claim to fame, an opportunity he swiftly fulfils. But this black felt Homburg affects Mercier's life in a wholly unexpected manner as it bestows upon its new owner a torrent of confidence, authority and fervour which sees him criticize a senior colleague during a meeting, leading to a promotion and a new life in Rouen.
However the hat becomes elusive as it makes a habit of escaping its owners. The plot follows the meanderings of the Homburg as it tumbles from one owner to the next and witnesses the almost-magical influence the hat imposes on their lives of these Parisians. The setting is at the heart of the novel and the depictions of Parisian life are charming and almost caricature at times, sprinkled with a playful light humour. Holidays in Brittany, evening aperitifs, oysters squirming at the drops of fresh lemon juice, it is all so very French. And it is infective. You have to question your morals when you find Mercier driving home after washing down his oysters with a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé and, wrapped up in the novel's lackadaisical realm, think that this is fine and dandy. But this is Paris in 1986, pre-internet, pre-mobile phones, where Parisian life streams simply along like the dreams of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and at times it reminded me of the Paris of Woody Allen's Mightnight in Paris. The novel's structure adds to this comfortable, pleasurable nostalgia as it fades masterfully in and out of each scene with great fluidity, giving the narrative a very cinematic feel. Hence many a critic's desire to apply that beloved phrase, an ‘easy-read', to The President's Hat.
At the mere mention of that phrase, many a literary-snob might upturn their nose and exclaim that this novel, alas!, is not for them. Often association with summer-time beach reads or novels which absorb you during a tedious train journey, the ‘easy-read' is often assumed to be lacking a serious purpose beyond its desire to entertain. The President's Hat, rather, springs a number of stimulating questions and themes. The way the hat ‘magically' confers confidence and change in the lives of the novel's characters has something thought-provoking to say about the psychological origins of self-confidence. Also, the figure of Mitterrand as a potent, influential figurehead who leaves his mark on the architectural landscape of Paris, on the political landscape France as a nation, as well as influencing those around him with his presence and his hat, forces readers to reflect on the nature of power, leadership and what that should be. Published en français by Flammarion on the eve of the inauguration of the current French president, Monsieur Hollande, The President's Hat makes us wonder whether this narrative would have been possible or feasible had Hollande or Nicolas Sarkozy replaced Mitterrand in the role of influential head of state...
The President's Hat is a novel which poses significant and relevant questions about modern life, modern leaders, and offers readers a nostalgia for the serenity of a perhaps outmoded way of life that many of us still (wrongly?) deem to be la vie française. And Laurain achieves this in a charming, agréable style which is light-hearted and very well-written. A word must also be said for the excellence of the translation by Gallic Books which is completely idiomatic, engrossing, and never reminds you that you are reading a text in translation. Which is no mean feat, so Bravo!
Originally published at: http://bit.ly/1nvQ9xV
Alice, a not-all-that-young French police officer, wakes to find herself handcuffed to a stranger in the middle of Central Park, New York. All that she can recall from the previous evening is knocking back cocktails... in Paris. But before you point out that this is just a French take on the ‘Hangover', the aforementioned-and-attached-to-our-hero stranger awakes to introduce himself as Gabriel, an American Jazz musician who claims that just last night he was knocking down pints of Guinness while performing in Dublin. Pfft, likely story. Alice, with her keen police-heightened instincts, can smell liars a mile off. But then there is blood on her shirt - how did that get there? And there is a bullet missing from her gun - where has it gone? These and the other million unanswered questions that open the novel are (of course) resolved through the exploration of our protagonist's history as a younger officer heavily involved in a series of linked murders and the repercussions of that case on her own physical, personal and psychological health.
I thought ‘Central Park' was a decent enough thriller which probed at the reader's curiosity in the opening chapters and then turning over each stone of the novel's mystery with a few not-too-surprising twists on the way. It was, as we imagine was the author's principal intention, entertaining and the narrative flowed well. Nonetheless this was my first Musso novel and I did note a number of frustrating elements that took the edge away from what is in principle an interesting, if unlikely, story. Firstly was how cheesy the novel is. From the supposedly-illuminating quotes which open each chapter, to the clichéd descriptions of landscapes, people, events, to the completely unnecessary, unwarranted, unwanted yet completely expected ending, there is little that is original in Musso's writing. The story flows well but at the expense of the language which never forces the reader to think very much about the language used. Likewise I found the use of pathetic fallacy, which is constant, again to be unnecessary, clichéd, dated but it was something that I came to expect in the novel. The strongest section of the novel, I felt, was not to do with the suspense or the plot but the way Musso discusses the psychological effects of Alice's trauma on her life and her thought processes as she faces up to it. Otherwise I thought ‘Central Park' to be a predictable, comfortable read which will entertain readers with its plot but certainly not with its literary prowess.
Originally posted at: http://bit.ly/1maZOc4
Startling, brutal, ambitious, vulgar, intriguing, provocative, odious and emotional. The parade of adjectives you could throw at Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and would stick reveals the great range and breadth of life that this 20th century classic contains. Often described as a ‘series of short stories', Trainspotting covers a sequence of narratives depicting the life of Mark Renton and his pals, referred to as the Skag Boys due to their notorious heroin love-affair, as they go about their drink and drugs fuelled existence in Leith, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. More often than not, the narrative is delivered in the first-person through the distinct voices of the characters, usually Renton who might be deemed the book's protagonist. Along with works such as Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting is completely original in its textual experimentation to reproduce the voices of urban Scotland and of the Scottish working classes. The narrative voices of Renton and co are defined by their vibrant Scots dialect, loaded with all its profanities, musicality and character, and the book would have been a drastically different, and inferior, one if written within the confines of what we call “Standard English”. The narrative's twists and shifts in perspective, being told in the first-person by several characters but then also in the third-person at times, gives the book as a whole a very rounded feel and provides almost an encircling, panoramic shot of the lives of its characters in Leith. To call Trainspotting ‘a series of short stories', I feel, is unjust. A short story is more often than not a complete, ‘boxed-off' (in the sense of not relying on other pieces for finality), final piece, and although you might find a collection of short stories which relay a common theme, or a common location, or perhaps a recurrent character, I cannot think of another book which treats character and narrative as Welsh does here and for this he must be given credit. To me, it felt more like a novel, but a novel of ambitious experimentation. Welsh seems to have looked at all the tools available to an author to tell a story and wondered “why restrict myself to one, when I can use the whole bloody lot?!”
With so much experimentation going on it can be difficult to slip comfortably into the ‘novel', but after a couple of pages have elapsed and the little Scots voice in your head has found its rhythm, it is a gripping and intriguing book. Intriguing in its ability to shock from the very beginning as we find Rents rummaging through a blocked public toilet full of his own, and others', defecation in search of a pack of recently acquired pills. Such narratives, replete with nothing less than a rich variety of profanities, are the bread and butter of Trainspotting. This may lead critics to label Welsh's work as insolent, vulgar, disreputable and perhaps even unrealistic. But I felt instead that Welsh's Leith and its characters are realistic to the point of almost being tangible; you can smell their stench, hear their aggressive voices and relate to their moral dilemmas. Which is one of Trainspotting's greatest achievements; despite their doubtlessly contemptible, sordid behaviour, the reader still empathises with these characters and you even grow to like them. Why? Although from the outset such characters, fictional or non-fictional I might add, appear to occupy a completely different galaxy to ourselves, Trainspotting offers a window into the emotional complexities of characters like Renton and Sick Boy, and it allows us to think on their terms and put ourselves in their shoes, where strangely and perhaps scarily we find that we have more things in common with these people than we like to imagine. Emotions, friendships, relationships with other human beings. At the end of the day we are all human beings.
When giving reasons for why we like to read literature, you might often get the idealistic, romantic response that reading allows us to transport ourselves to an unfamiliar place, to nigh-experience an exotic culture, to empathise with characters far from ourselves which give us a fuller vision of the world we inhabit. We might think of Wordsworth describing the beauties of the Lakes and the plights of the Cumbrian man on his rural farm, revealing the stories of the ‘common man' to the poetic world. Jack Kerouac's On the Road allows us to swing into the zipping, jazz and alcohol-imbued lifestyles of 1940s America and run along Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady in his wild, exuberant adventures. Trainspotting does the same, giving readers an honest insight into the lifestyles of a generation growing up in the looming shadow of Maggie Thatcher whose government rid Britain of thousands of jobs belonging to working class lads like Renton and Sick Boy. There doesn't seem to be much left for them, except for shooting up and attending each other's funerals, but this, so it seems, is simply how things were. But Trainspotting is also a celebration of life and a call for solidarity. The vibrancy and unpredictability of Renton and co shows the liveliness of youth and friendship despite the squalid lifestyles they have been dealt, and Welsh's desire for us to empathise with such characters allows us to regard equivalent characters in our own society as worthy of attention, and indeed to persuade us to stop demonizing particular sections of society and instead to remain together in hope of positive social change.
Originally published at: http://bit.ly/1maZZnH
After an engrossing and thrilling first chapter, readers may expect a zipping crime novel full of action and intrigue. Which The Spring of Kasper Meier does have in plenty. But the novel's strength is to be found in Fergusson's poignant evocation of a Berlin left desecrated by war, and the enigmatic creatures who emerge from this landscape and spin the web of mystery that characterises the dangerous but enthralling city.
A setting that gives so much to its readers, but not so much to its characters. Food is sparse, meat a rare luxury and the city's inhabitants are ravenous. Many have resorted to trading on the black market to find food, and it is the rare, intact remains from the war which seem to be the currency of Fergusson's Berlin, whether it be barely-working watches, old cameras, shoes obtained from a recently found corpse or whatever else. The novel's protagonist, Kasper Meier, is one man who trades on the market in an attempt to support himself and his elderly father. Kasper can get you anything, for a certain price. Which is perhaps why Eva Hirch finds herself at his door asking for information about a British soldier. Herr Meier is instantly captivated by this droll but young, pretty, precocious girl but does not fancy getting tangled up in military affairs and hence tells her no can do. He is left slightly dumbfounded when she then begins to blackmail him. Because everybody has a secret in Berlin, and if someone knows yours that could be the end of you. Beyond her opaque façade, Meier spies an inherent goodness in Eva and convinces himself that he is only finding the information to help out young Eva, despite having been threatened himself. Eva, too, is drawn towards Meier's mystery but restrains herself from developing a friendship with him due to the watching eye of her shadowy employer Frau Beckmann who seems to have her finger in every pie and is incessantly present due to her two lurking twins Hans and Lena. As the plot unravels, Meier and Eva find themselves to be two vulnerable elements of a seemingly-inescapable and increasingly-intricate thread of murder and mystery which leaves the reader flicking through the novel's almost 400 pages.
But despite enjoying the action provided by the plot, what I found most enjoyable about the novel was Fergusson's highly sensual description of the city and his attention to detail, both of which gave his city a three-dimension shape and made his plot believable, convincing and hence entirely engrossing. So when Eva first enters Kasper's flat, she doesn't smell coffee but rather ‘the sour smell of old ersatz coffee and rancid milk'. Likewise when she sits down the reader is made aware of ‘a stream of little cuts and bruises, pink, grey, blue and yellow, tumbled down her forearms to her hands where the skin around her fingernails was red and bitten' and between talking we are offered details such as ‘she [...] briefly nibbled at her cuticle'. Such descriptions and attention to detail abound Fergusson's prose and allow the reader to slip into the world of these characters, a world that is completely foreign to our twenty-first century existences but is made familiar through Fergusson's descriptive powers. In fact, although I haven't read an enormous amount of historical fiction recently, not since Mantel's Bringing Up The Bodies have I read such compelling descriptions that really evoke the historical period in the reader's imagination. Moreover, Fergusson spent 4 years researching his novel in Berlin and so references to places, names, facts and doses of German are dotted around the prose and enhance the authenticity and believability of the novel. His research seems to have certainly paid off and I can't wait for my next trip to Berlin this June when I will inspect the city with Fergusson's Berlin fixedly in my mind's eye.
All in all Fergusson has achieved an outstandingly well written novel which contains a fine balance of action, historical interest, setting and character. It is an excellent debut novel and I will look forward to see what Fergusson adds to his newly-opened oeuvre in the coming years.
It's safe to say that Liesel Meminger, the novel's dainty protagonist, isn't granted the easiest of lives by its narrator. It's 1939 and Liesel (LEE-zul) is just nine years old. Yet despite her tender age she has already witnessed the death of her six year old brother, has been torn away from her mother and re-established chez the Hubermann's on Himmel Street, Molching, a small (fictitious) German town just beyond the outskirts of Munich. All she has to remind her of her previous life is a book, The Gravedigger's Handbook, surreptitiously amassed at her brother's funeral. Despite her inability to read, this is the object to which she clings for safety and comfort as she settles into life on Himmel Street, and it is this book, the first of the book thief's booty, which leads her on the path to her new life.
For me, the main strength of this novel is the panoply of characters who make Himmel Street it's dynamic, intriguing and entertaining self. In the Hubermann household there is Papa, arguably the novel's hero, an accordion-playing, story-telling, mischievous paternal charmer who teaches young Liesel to read during secretive 3am visits to her bedroom and thus revealing to her the power and beauty of literature and language, all the while bearing the brunt of his wife's foul mouth. The cantankerous Mrs Hubermann is a woman with a big mouth but a bigger heart and despite the incessant train of Saumensch, Arschloch, and Saukerls which steam 100 miles per hour from her choppers, she never fails in her unwavering support and love for her family (often provided in the form of watery soups). Leisel's acquires a lemon-haired local friend, Rudy, who adds the zest of youth with his passionate love of life which on many occasions leads to bouts of charming humour (in one such incident, he paints himself in mud and races down the local track in imitation of hero Jesse Owens, a stunt not appreciated by Aryan-idealising Nazi-supporting locals). These characters, plus a host of others including Max Vandenburg, Isla Hermann and Alex Steiner, give the street its great variety. But collectively what ties this eccentric gang together is essentially their innate humanity. Through his microscopic inspection of Molching, Zusak drills home the emotional complexities of human relationships and demonstrates that, despite being fooled by a man with a moustache, these people were human and such people must have existed among the dreadful monster that emerged from Germany between 1939 and 1945.
“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
Yet this is not the only uniting element. Every character contained in the novel is part of the thread that makes up the rope of the narrative, a narrative spun and dictated by its narrator. It seems fitting, then, that personified Death tells this tale and dictates the movement of the narrative's rope. Yet Zusak's personification of Death is by no means a traditional one and is perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the novel. This is no rapacious, black-hooded reaper trawling around seducing everybody with his scythe, and Death himself mocks this naïve conception of his persona by mankind. As the characters dwindle along their paths towards him, there is almost a melancholy in the tone of Death's character, a melancholy that he too is forced to accept the inevitability of his own existence. An interesting alternative, which enriches the tragic sadness of the story. Even he is mesmerized by the power of humanity, tenderly collecting the victims of a man-made mess, and is forced to admit by the novel's end that it is he who is “haunted by humans”.
I only really had two issues with the novel on the whole: the first is the occasional clichés in the language which, despite on the whole being well-written and is strong enough to support what is a winsome story, can fall into patterns of predictability and did not seem to arrest me or shock me at any point. It flowed along quite comfortably, which I suppose is what a novel of this genre should do. The second thing is a confusion in plot; throughout the novel we are pretty certain that it is Death narrating the story, yet towards the end we discover that actually Death picked up Liesel's book, The Book Thief, which is what we are now reading. So in that case, did Liesel write her own life story from the perspective of a personified Death (quite advanced for a 13 year old...)? I understand why Zusak uses Death to narrate his story, and I can also understand why, for the story to be Liesel's personal story, she would have had to have narrated it. It seems that the author perhaps couldn't make his made up and thus this confusion arises. It doesn't, of course, affect the novel's poignant message, but I guess this is but a small detail and just me being pernickety! (My apologies...)
What will win over many a bibliophile in this novel, including myself, is the central theme of the power of literature as a source of empowerment during the bleakest moments of life, and indeed the bleakest periods of human history. Today, in a society where 63% of men rarely read, this may seem a tad hackneyed, far-fetched and ideological. Yet literature is the power which wakes our protagonist in the middle of the night, compels her to climb through windows to grab new material, gives her a direction and comfort in her new life, a new life which is eventually saved through writing a book (in more than one way) at the denouement of the book. With a message like that, surely there is only one thing you can do from here?
Originally published at: http://bit.ly/1n6zEbz