You bear the unbearable because you have no other choice

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

You have to know this book is setting you up to carry a heavy weight. The setting: Nazi Germany. The narrator: Death. That's all you really need to know, yes?

Liesel steals her first book at her brother's graveside. Her brother, who died beside her on a train as her mother accompanied them to a new foster home. Her father? A Communist, so who knows where he was. Liesel gets new parents, a harridan of a mother and a gentle musician father. And a new life. She learns to read, makes friends, all against the backdrop of a gathering storm, that breaks out in Poland, and then everywhere.

And then... her new Papa owes his survival in the First World War to a comrade who lost his life. He vowed to the widow that he would be there to repay the debt. And so the family finds itself sheltering a young Jewish man in the basement.

Because it's Nazi Germany, even the glimmers of joy are against a background of dread, destruction, and death. Speaking of death, the narrator helpfully softens the blow by foreshadowing much that befalls them. And yet, each time the dagger falls, it cuts. Reading this book is a devastating experience.

And yet, there are those glimmers of joy and beauty. For one, you discover that beneath the carping facade of Liesel's foster mother is a loving, giving, and strong woman. Zusak offers a plausible depiction of a town where many of the people (with a capital P if you like) do not subscribe to the policies and beliefs of the Nazis, and perform their own small acts of rebellion. Everyone was culpable, but maybe some did all they could.

"This bright brute is the gayest"

...of his novels. This is how Nabokov described King, Queen, Knave, which he first wrote in exile in the late 1920s and which his son translated into English in the 1960s. Set in Berlin, the king is the moneyed entrepreneur Dreyer. He's a bit of a buffoon, like the caricatures of Germans in French literature from the late nineteenth century. (I did a paper on this in grad school. Don't ask. Actually, you can ask. It was really fun to read kids' books that made fun of Germans in Alsace.) The queen is his wife, Martha. She's kind of a cipher, beautiful and cold and bewitching. Except maybe also not that attractive. The knave is our naive (and any pun there is an accident of translation) Franz, Dreyer's nephew, who has come to Berlin for a job at his uncle's store and soon becomes a fixture in the Dreyer household.

I started reading and got swept up in it immediately. I loved the way it was so much a product of a gay and glittering and yet not-so-glamorous time. And so entirely Russian, even as it was set in Berlin with German characters. But then, after a few days, I found myself distracted, and picking up other reading material when I got into bed. The last 50-60 pages came well after the rest. And it shouldn't have gotten boring. I put it down right in the middle of a murder plot. So what happened?

I can't answer the question. I - or the book - just lost momentum. Sometimes that happens. When I finally did get to those last few pages, it came together in a perfectly satisfactory way. I can't complain. But all the joy and passion in my reading was gone. Strange. But still, for the first 100 or so pages in particular, it was a delight.

Oh, and this was my fourth and final selection for the Russian Reading Challenge. I do have one more bonus entry though before the year is through.