I finished the reading (i.e. listening) in cold Paris, March 2009 walking on the dark streets of this city. And the first thing I did after I finished was to go back to the beginning and to start it again....
"First the colors. Then the humans" - this is how it starts, the story told from the perspective of ... death personified. The narration brings some far but strong recollections of that used by Norman Mailer in his "The Castle in the Forest", but don't take it as criticism - in fact it is a praise....
What makes Zusak's book such increadible experience? First and foremost - his vacabulary, his parlance, his prose poetry. Bacause of these, you loose the sense of reading the novel, and you feel like you are reading the poetry...
"I can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule it. And I remain. I carry them away. "
"The girl loved that-- the shivering snow"
One of my friends told me, when recommended the book couple of weeks ago: "I did not know how one could live through the words as it is in the book" ...
But there is also something else. The book has deep meaning and strong message. It is about the most dark period of human history - Nazi Germany. It's about Jewish persecution and Holocaust. But it is also about forgivness, about love, about the simple fact that not all Germans were Nazi and not all Nazis were killers. It's about life in hard times, and about difficult greatness.
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This book is awesome, will definitely read it in English soon (but I think the Polish translation was good, too!). The metaphors he uses for describing views and feelings truly give you an image of a given feeling. What a skill!
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