‘Books don’t care
how educated you are’
The Book Thief was on the New York Times best-seller list for 375
weeks and has been translated into over 40 languages. But, ‘I feel removed from
it’, says Markus Zusak
Though his first
three novels — The Underdog, Fighting
Ruben Wolfe, and When Dogs Cry —
won Australian author Markus Zusak a number of awards, it was The Book Thief (2005) that catapulted
him to international fame.
Set in war-torn Germany and narrated by Death, the
story of Liesel Meminger and her family hiding a Jew in their basement from the
Nazis was masterfully told, unsettling and moving. Zusak, winner of the
Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association, is a speaker
at The Hindu Lit for Life 2017.
Excerpts from an
email interview with Markus Zusak by Radhika Santhanam.
While your first
few books are more typically young adult fiction or coming-of-age novels, The Book Thief is different: it’s for
young adults but also for older adults. What makes it stand apart?
I don’t know, to
tell you the truth, sometimes The Book
Thief just feels like its own thing, and I feel almost removed from it. I
know it was just a book I had different ambitions for in the writing. I
honestly thought it would be my least successful book; so at one point, I just
went, ‘Well I might as well do it exactly how I want to’. The way I set it
apart for myself is simply that I’ve written five novels that have been
published, and four of them really mean something to me, and one of them means
everything to me, and that’s The Book
Thief.
How did you
decide to make Death the main character? Death’s voice is unique: he’s
understanding, curious, even compassionate, not the morbid way in which we
understand him generally.
I just thought
that we always say that war and death are like best friends, so who better to
be hanging around during wartime? It was a very complicated thing to get right,
though. At first Death was too sardonic and sadistic, so I made Liesel the
narrator, then a simpler third person narration… It wasn’t until I thought that
Death might be scared of humans that the whole book started making sense.
How difficult was
it to write a book differently about a subject as well explored as life in Nazi
Germany?
I never thought
of it as a Holocaust novel or even a book set in Nazi Germany, to be honest. It
was simply a kind of language I’d discovered — like scratching something open
in my mind, reaching down and pulling out the world of Himmel Street.
What did you
think of the film?
I was invited to
the set once, and everyone was asking, ‘Is this how you imagined it?’; I didn’t
have the heart to say that the set didn’t quite match the image in my mind,
which was very spare, very grim, especially in the Hubermann’s household… but
you know, that’s the beauty of films — it’s a bit like people saying you look
just like your brother, but you know in your heart that you’re both very
different.
All your books
have characters that love reading. In The Book Thief , words save Liesel’s life
and you speak about how the Führer was nothing without words. In I am a
Messenger , Ed Kennedy loves reading, and so does Cameron Wolfe in Getting the
Girl . Curiously none of them goes to school. Is this a deliberate pattern?
I’ve just always
loved books, and I love the idea that we’re all just really made of stories. I
do also like the idea that anyone can love books. Books don’t care how educated
you are, or what you do for a living.
My parents were
both blue collar workers, but encouraged all their kids to love books, and so I
think I’ve always liked that idea of combining the images of working class life
and intelligence. That’s how I grew up.
What is your
process for writing? What’s your schedule?
A good friend of
mine and I are always talking about routines, and getting into good ones and
then sticking with them. I like to work in the morning, usually from 7-12, and
still always hope to do more later. At the end of a book I just work most of
the time, but in general, I like to be working nice and early. With kids,
though, these routines change, but that’s okay too!
What’s your next
book about?
It’s about a boy
who’s building a bridge and has a lot of good reasons to do it. I think I’m
always somehow interested in characters who want to make one perfect thing, to
transcend humanness, even if only for a moment.
In this case, the
test is whether the bridge can stand the flood when it comes — but of course,
every story never ends where you think it will. It’s always somehow left or
right of where you thought it would be…
Excerpted from today’s ‘Sunday
Magazine’, The Hindu
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