Makus Zusak talks about writing The Book Thief

When I was growing up in suburban Sydney, I was told stories of cities on fire and Jews being marched to concentration camps. Both my parents grew up in Europe during World War II, and although they were extremely young at the time, in hindsight, they were able to understand many things. Two stories my mother told me about growing up in Munich always stuck with me. One was about a burning sky when the city was bombed. The other was about a boy being whipped on the street for giving a starving Jewish man a piece of
bread. The man sank to his knees and thanked the boy, but the bread was stripped away and both the taker of the bread and the giver were punished.

This showed me that there was another side to Nazi Germany, and it was a side I wanted to write about. At first I thought of a biography, but as a writer of fiction, I knew it wouldn’t take long for the itch to imagine to climb out of me and into the story. Another problem was that Nazi Germany, Hitler and all associated
topics had been written about before, so how could I make my own story original?

My first thought was to make it a personal story, about a girl. Then came an idea that I’d had floating in my head for a couple of years about a stealer of books. Soon I realised that words were a good metaphor for Nazi Germany. It was words (and Hitler’s ability to use them) that contained the power to murder and ostracise. What I set out to create was a character to juxtapose the way Hitler used words. She would be a stealer of books and a prolific reader. She, too, would occasionally use words to hurt, but she would understand their power to heal and give life through stories. Immediately, I had dark and light. I had the contradictory element of humanity’s good and evil, but it still wasn’t enough.

For more than a year, I tried everything to make the book work, but somehow it never did. I tried first person, third person, second person, shifting points of view, present and past tense, and none of it gave me what I wanted.

Then I stumbled upon the idea of Death narrating the story, and it all made sense. Who is constantly hanging around in times of war? Who would have the opportunity to pick up a story penned by a girl in a bombed German city? Death was the right answer, although there were still a few decisions to be made.
When I first brought Death into the story, he was sinister. He enjoyed his work a little too much. For months I wrote in this way and again I was falling short in some aspect I couldn’t understand. When I took a break from the book, I was sitting down on the back step and it hit me that Death should actually be afraid... of us. The irony of this was exciting, and it made perfect sense. Death is on hand to see the greatest crimes and miseries of human life, and I thought, What if he tells this story as a way of proving to himself that humans are actually worthwhile?

At that point, I started writing and I didn’t stop. In the end, The Book Thief took me three years to write. If nothing else, I know it’s a far different book from anything I’ve done before, which is what made it so challenging. I was also finally satisfied that there was a good sense of imagination in it. In three years, I must have failed over a thousand times, but each failure brought me closer to what I needed to write, and for that, I’m grateful.

Interview sourced from Picador Australia

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The Book Thief

Author: Markus Zusak
Publisher: Picador
Price: $ 32.95

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