The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The book just made me weep.  For the senseless destruction, torture of human lives during Hitler’s reign.  The Jews, the ordinary, the poor non Jews.  What made it specially poignant was that the story is narrated by Death.  The personification of Death leaves no suspense, no doubt about the outcome of the novel.   It was a story about Death, a story narrated by Death about events on Himmel Street.  Himmel means Heaven and it is anything but.

It is hard to give an objective analysis of a book which you “feel” more than you read.  It was a beautiful, sensitive story of a young girl (Liesel Meminger) who saw power in words.  Reading was her life--she stole books so that she could live.  Her first book was “The Grave Digger’s Handbook (A Twelve-Step Guide to Grave-digging Success)” published by the Bayern Cemetery Association. A grave digger accidentally drops this book in the dirt when she is at her six year-old brother’s funeral.  She does not know how to read yet, but this book  keeps the memory of her brother alive--that is when she saw her brother last.  Her mother leaves her in the care of Hans and Rosa Hubermann  in a small town outside of Munich and disappears forever.  Her new Papa never leaves her side, and in the nights when she is haunted by nightmares he holds her, plays the accordion for her but most of all, teaches her how to read. In the days to come, the Nazi Party is gets more and more powerful, more and more demanding. Words of hate are sown.  But Molching town is a victim of it just as the Jews were.  Families had lost their children to the war. They had lost their livelihoods.  The young kids were almost always hungry while farmers were feeding Nazis and their propaganda.  Hans (Papa) is a kind man, stands up to the German soldiers, feeds the parade of Jews morsels of bread, hides a Jew (Max) in his home.  He is so full of love for humanity--but he is just very very poor.  His wife washes people’s clothes and we see under the Nazi regime people getting poorer and poorer.  Small businesses have to shut down.  Nobody works but Death.   
Death is a presence. Death is compassionate, affected by all the killings and the bombings.  It complains that it is overworked.  Death kneels at the bodies of children and the aged and the innocent.  If it weren’t for Death as a character in the book, this is just another book on the holocaust.  Death gives us hints constantly.  Periodically, in bold lettering, like a PowerPoint, it gives us a brief character analysis;

THE CONTRADICTORY POLITICS 

OF ALEX STEINER 

Point One: He was a member of the Nazi Party, but he did not hate the Jews, or anyone else for that matter. 

Point Two: Secretly, though, he couldn’t help feeling a percentage of relief (or worse—gladness!) when Jewish shop owners were put out of business— propaganda informed him that it was only a matter of time before a plague of Jewish tailors showed up and stole his customers. 

Point Three: But did that mean they should be driven out completely?

 Point Four: His family. Surely, he had to do whatever he could to support them. If that meant being in the party, it meant being in the party. 

Point Five: Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out. (page 59)

or a peek into the future--In the year 1940, Death says, "Flash forward to the basement, September 1943".  Usually, the forecast not a rosy one--it’s Death, after all.  “The trouble is, who could ever replace me?” (pg 5)  That’s Death’s burden. It is constantly hauling bodies  What was the takeaway from this book? In Death’s words, “I’m always finding humans at their best and worst.  I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.  Still, they have one thing I envy.  Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die”.  (page 491)
Long book.  Lot of time to weep for death of innocence.  In one of Max Vandenburg's nightmares, he has a fistfight with Hitler and his men but he seems powerless against them. "In the basement of 33 Himmel Street (Hans' house), Max Vandenburg could feel the fists of an entire nation. One by one they climbed into the ring and beat him down."(page 254) In such moments he dreams of Liesel giving him succor. He talks of his dreams with her-- opens her palms, gives her the words and closes them again. The legacy of "The Word Shaker" that he leaves behind, inspires Liesel to write her own book which Death finds in the rubble after the bombing of Himmel Street. It holds on to it till it comes to fetch Liesel many many years later.
I don’t know why young adults should be exposed to so much grief. Very readable book but emotionally draining.

Zusak, Markus. The Book Thief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Print.

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The Gardens of Consolation

The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza spans about 40 yrs of Iran’s political turmoil from 1920-1953.  The journey of the young couple,Talla and Sardar, from Ghamsar to Shemiran describes not just a change in physical landscape but a shifting political landscape as well.  Talla believed that Ghamsar, the beautiful green valley,  was a “lost corner of paradise fallen from heaven”.  At 12, she trusts Sardar enough to brave djinns and ogres in the mountains to move north towards Tehran and make a life there away from her cruel father.  The author talks about how Talla had no idea the country was ruled by a king, did not know his name. “She has never heard the words history, geography, Asia, Europe, Russia or England.”  Russians, French, British, Germans all lived in that country, but she had never seen them.  She did not know even Iran’s tribes. In keeping with this primitiveness of its main characters, the author uses the Iranian calendar as opposed to the Gregorian one.  Talla arrives at a more restrictive city  Sharh-e Rey where she is expected to wear the chador all the time. There is a new social order here of masters and peasants which was totally different from that of Ghamsar which was not ruled by any khan and where everyone owned his own house and land.  No one feared anyone else.  Reza Khan is now in power.  Ultimately, they move to Shemiran. The bazaaris of Tehran disturbed Sardar and he sought to move away from them.  This migration proved to be propitious as it brought Bahram, their son, close to schools and the right social and political contacts.  But Sardar only moved so that he could keep to himself. He never even went to the mosque. He did not want to make decisions for other people, “ to command or change the world”.  He was happy with his radio (which he listened to believing everything and commenting on nothing ) and the acquisition of property.  So why did he leave his hometown Ghamsar?  He wanted his son to know the world beyond the mountains. His son never wanted to reveal to important people what his father did for a living, but ultimately Sardar did make a lot of money out of the land he bought! Talla was happy housekeeping, did not worry about politics, or voting or women’s rights. That was Bahram’s life.  Not the women’s rights.  He used women, treated them shamefully.  I think that is another reason why democracy did not work in Iran. All the ‘farangi’ women were liberated enough, but the Iranian men treated their own women rather badly. We see signs of that quite early in his life when he exhibits jealousy towards his teacher’s husband. Bahram knew he wanted Iran to be a democratic state but he never worked to change his community--only networked for himself. Did he even notice that when he started school the schools had children of “mixed ages and every sort of background, the destitute and the well-to-do”? Soon, that too changes-- once Reza Shah abdicates the throne in favor of his son after the 1941 Allied offensive. And the new king reinstates old traditions. The author stresses at every crisis point in Iran’s political scene that the common man has no role to play in deciding the fate of his country. “Sardar has no part in it, and Talla does not even count.”

Each chapter described subtle changes in their lives due to political upheavals but life went on for Sardar and Talla. However, Bahram was in the world of men, “men of his own era: passionate, uncompromising, brave, self-centered, seductive, authoritarian.” Iran is still evolving.  It got rid of all the international elements-- Britain (that country again!) messed up big time. Partnered with Russia then with US… 

Iran was yet to find its political destiny.  It tried democracy but could not sustain it.  Because of people like Sardar and Talla, parents of Bahram.  In the last chapter of the book, Bahram’s friend’s father comments that democracy came too soon to the country.  It was brought by aristocrats who wanted “the best of everything here: the constitution,  a secular society, freedom of expression, civil rights….Except you can’t just place an order for things like that, or buy them; they have to be learned and they take time, a long time.”  That comes at a price.  Democracy was the political ambition of the intellectual elite not of the 80% illiterate masses. Which was very true.  Right after the coup against Mossadegh, the defeat of the Communist party, the operation AJAX by the CIA, Talla and Sardar are enjoying the Gholhaki night without Bahram.  Sardar is smoking his pipe, Talla is pouring out tea and Sardar exclaims “Allahu Akbar! The world is so beautiful here this evening.  What more could we ask?”

Bahram represents the challenges of a first generation literate who desires to do well but he was not very likable.  He only succeeded in projecting himself as a social climber. His attitude towards women, his seductions, his possessiveness are all positively scary. He abused women. They would “primarily be partners in seduction, the stake in men’s desires” for “an age-old culture of harems and favorites could not be erased from men’s consciousness in the space of a decade simply because Iran had come into the modern age.” And the women themselves turned the game of seduction into playing with fire which is where they think lies the power. Bahram had contempt for his mother as well--he found her love too overbearing, enough for a lifetime.  He was ashamed of them for being illiterate but the truth is he was the failure. The author is obviously a feminist; when she talks about Talla’s miscarriage and the death of her second child, she is telling the readers that Talla was married very early and was not ready to have children or raise them.  And notice that each section of her book is named for a girl or a woman.  In this book Iran is the main character—and the plot is the fall of democracy. And the western world that worshiped individuality and freedom, played a large role in defeating democracy in Iran. It was through the combined efforts of England, Soviet Union and USA that democracy was defeated in Iran. The common people had no say and the intellectuals had no say in their own government.
The short chapters make the novel episodic. They seem to be isolated incidents with no relevance to the plot but actually lend a spirit of adventure to the characters' lives. Talla's first experience with seeing a car in her life, was amusing. For a while the reader saw the world through Talla's eyes. Somehow, her journey ended when her ambitions were fulfilled--to live contently under the stars not really concerned about the state of her country or the world.

Reza, Parisa. The Gardens Of Consolation. Europa Editions. New York. 2015. Print

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