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The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson - David Levithan and John Green

Review here: On People Named Will Grayson

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak

2005

I don’t know exactly why I picked this book. I was browsing through Amazon’s Kindle Store as I regularly do when I’m bored (this online shopping thing has done wonders for my financial fitness. Obviously.) when I saw this in the Young Adult fiction section.

I thought it was going to be something bright and breezy and fun.

Turns out I was wrong.

“The Book Thief” is the tale of a young girl in Nazi Germany, Liesel, who finds love, hope and freedom in the midst of hatred and destruction.

Wait. That sounded a lot more trite than it actually is.

Because there is nothing typical or simple or sensible about “The Book Thief”.

The road was cold and straight. It wasn’t long till the soldiers came with the Jews. In the tree shadows, Liesel watched the boy. How things had changed, from fruit stealer to bread giver. His blond hair, although darkening, was like a candle. She heard his stomach growl — and he was giving people bread. Was this Germany? Was this Nazi Germany?

That’s about Rudy, by the way, the young boy-next-door who never had enough to eat yet braved the coldest river to save a book in exchange for a chaste kiss.

That’s them: Rudy and Rosa and Hans and Max and Alex and Liesel and everyone else on Himmel Street.

It’s all about them.

The thing about history is that we all like to think of things in very grandiose terms. The world is a struggle between giants. Adolf Hitler versus Winston Churchill. MacArthur makes the Emperor of Japan surrender.

And then we go into statistics mode. Millions of Jews. Thousands of Germans.

Faceless. Lifeless. Meaningless.

We do not care. Or maybe we don’t want to. Because caring about the lives of millions innocently caught up in the battle between giants is a difficult thing we can’t face without breaking down and going insane.

History can be a little too black and white.

Germans bad. Americans good.

It’s very easy to just believe that the entirety of Germany decided to rise up and straight murder the Jews. Them. Their neighbours, friends, lovers — all of them Jews who’ve been Germans just like everyone else before it became illegal to be of the wrong race, the wrong colour, the wrong religion.

That is a very human thing to do.

To categorise. To label.

The truth is that we don’t give ourselves enough credit.

Germans. They’re a lot more human than we wish them to be. Because realising that a lot of Germans did their best to help and hide their Jewish friends is beyond the ken of normal understanding. 

Why would we bomb German cities? Why would the good guys murder innocent people?

Why would we kill Hans? Rosa? Rudy?

Why bomb a street full of ordinary people? An accordion player. A loudmouth nag. A boy with lemon-coloured hair. 

What’s the point?

I wish there was a better answer.

One better than “this is war; we do what we have to do.” Truthful, practical, but no less heartbreaking.

“The Book Thief” tells us we’re better than that, really.

That despite our penchant for destruction, our capacity for good is equal, if not greater. 

That there’s more to us than one-dimensional, sterilised categorisations.

We’re human.

I’m crying.

Jesus mothereffing Christ.

This is embarrassing.

Of course I’ve cried over books in the past, but never like this.

Portents of old age?

And I thought “Never Let Me Go” was a unique case. Now here’s “The Book Thief”.

Reduce me to a blubbering mess why don’t you.

So much shit in the middle of a world forced into hatred and anger and suffering and yet we manage to go on looking for and even finding beauty.

Humans.

So much pain and suffering and pointlessness and stupidity and futility yet our capacity to love never diminishes.

How is this possible?

How do we look at shit and say, “we’ll get through this”?

How do we hope? How do we dream?

Why do we persevere in this bloody thankless existence?

Honestly? I think it’s because we can.

***A SMALL BUT NOTE WORTHY NOTE***
I’ve seen so many young men over the years who think they’re running at other young men.
They are not.
They’re running at me.

- Death, on war and young men. 

by Markus Zusak, “The Book Thief”, 2005

In class, she did not speak.
She didn’t so much as look the wrong way.
As winter set in, she was no longer a victim of Sister Maria’s frustrations, preferring to watch as others were marched out to the corridor and given their just rewards. the sound of another student struggling in the hallway was not particularly enjoyable, but the fact that it was someone else was, if not a true comfort, a relief.

Markus Zusak, “The Book Thief”, 2005

He thought how much life exacts for the worthless or very commonplace blessings it can give a man. For instance, to gain, before forty, a university chair, to be an ordinary professor, to expound ordinary and second-hand thoughts in dull, heavy, insipid language — in fact, to gain the position of a mediocre learned man, he, Kovrin, had had to study for fifteen years, to work day and night, to endure a terrible mental illness, to experience an unhappy marriage, and to do a great number of stupid and unjust things which it would have been pleasant not to remember.

- The Black Monk, Anton Chekhov

Oy, Anton, you have no idea how painful it was to come upon this passage. 

I’ve been a big fan of Cracked ever since I started working in a cubicle. It’s one way of coping with life in the corporate grind. I honestly think we ought to have a Cracked Appreciation Day. Those dick jokes they crank out every day do help minimize the number of people jumping out and painting the sidewalks with their bloody innards. 

So: Thanks, Cracked.

Anyway, this is not about Cracked. This is about a book I discovered, thanks to Cracked. David Wong (a pseudonym, for those who’ve already mentally conjured the image of a wise Asian man) is Cracked Senior Editor and author of “John Dies at the End”, aka JDatE. The book started out as a web series of sorts, which quickly snowballed into a book and — wait for it — a movie that’s already in post-prod. That’s as much of a writing success as anyone can hope for these days. 

The Skinny: the book follows the adventures of David Wong and his friend John. These high school buddies come across the “Soy Sauce” — a literally out of this world drug that allows them to see and travel through time and space. It shows them the “Shadow Men” and other astral or semi-astral beings. The effects of the Soy Sauce are long-lasting, so now the bastards see ghosts AND find a way to make a name for themselves with this little talent of theirs.

Along the way, they come across ghouls, floating jellyfish, clones, zombies and whatever else seems to be inhabiting these world right along side us clueless twerps. Turns out there’s something sinister afoot: there are parallel worlds, the evil god Korrok and nasty worm things that burrow into humans and use them as breeding grounds. 

Nasty.

Here’s the thing: Standing between us and bloody chaos are two of the most incompetent heroes ever made: David and John. 

Right now I don’t think it would be proper to discuss the book “technically”, e.g. David Wong has the tendency to ramble lengthily, causing the prose to be less than fluid yadda yadda critics. 

It does get a little difficult to follow the train of David Wong’s thought, but that’s explained as a side effect of the many adventures that he and John had while under the influence of the Soy Sauce. Even the narrative declares their adventures “unexplainable”, with no solid proof to back them up. It’s just a string of misdemeanors, felonies and homicides, if you really think about it.

The thing, though, is that it would be a great disservice to both David Wong and yourself to THINK too much. Certainly, there are occasional gems; poignant moments that allow you to peek into the humanity of Wong’s characters. But to expect this to be your new “Bhagavad Gita” is to expect too much.

This is not a book for introspection. This is not a book for cute insights.  You do not read this and strive to leave with a more profound outlook in life.

NO. This is a fun exercise in stretching the limits of reality, which is really really what good fiction should be. It strains credulity but enigmatically pulls you back in with its sheer stupidity. John and David (the protagonists) are disgusting and crude, but you root for them as you would for any other hero. 

They’re the John McClane of horror stories, if you will.

Kicking ass, taking no names. 

Sometimes, that’s all a really good book should be.

Billy’s neighbor had this little yappy dog, expensive thing. One day the old lady comes home and finds the little yapping thing in her backyard, only it’s not yapping because Billy has taken a hot glue gun and glued its jaws shut. He decided to do the eyes, too, and — look, the point is I think that people live on, forever, outside of time somehow. And I think people like Billy, they never change. And I think they all wind up in the same place, and you and I can wind up right among them and they have forever, literally forever, to do what they want with us. In whatever way people live, maybe you don’t have a body they can cut or bruise or burn but the worst pain isn’t in the nerve endings, is it? Total fear and submission and torment and deprivation and hopelessness, that tidal wave of hopelessness. They never get tired, they never sleep and you never, ever, ever die. They stay on top of you and they hold you down and down and down, forever.

definition of Hell, from John Dies at the End, aka JDatE, by David Wong

*SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER*

And it just weirds me out how his mom so cavalierly turns her husband into stone with the Medusa’s head. Granted, he’s an ass and a wife beater, but she’s supposed to be one of the good guys. 

As one Dr. Lance Sweets, Ph.D. once said, “Character’s who you are under pressure. Not who you are when everything’s fine.”

There’s no cure to the Medusa’s curse; the guy is good as dead/really dead. That’s not something a good person does so casually, callously and giddily. It’s just… wrong.