Markus Zusak: The Book Thief

So far, this has been one of the best books of 2012 for me (2012 as in the year I read it, this novel was published in 2006). It's more than 550 pages that go by in a couple of days - keeping you up at night because you just have to finish the story - and that also stay with you for a long time after you've reluctantly turned the last page. The Book Thief takes place in Nazi Germany, and is centered around a young girl, Liesel Meminger, who ends up in a foster home, after tragically losing her brother on the way to Molching, where their mother is forced to take her children, after her husband has been taken away because he is a "Kommunist". As World War II draws near and finally climaxes, we follow Liesel's growing relationship with her foster parents, Anna and Hans Hubermann, and the other Himmel Street neighbors. Hans is the most likeable and deeply moving character of the book. He works as a painter and plays an accordion whose story we come to know later in the novel, as his past is revealed to us. Anna's coarseness doesn't come near Hans's tenderness to the little girl, who won't even speak when she first arrives, but her affection towards her is equally strong. Another important character is Rudy Steiner, Liesel's friend at school, whose love for her is truly heroic. And finally Max Vandenburg - a Jew who the Hubermanns hide in their basement during the war - is a crucial figure, because the simplicity and tenderness of his relationship with Liesel make the backdrop of the holocaust all the more horrific. The story is well plotted, all the characters are intense and well-rounded, but the main strong points of the novel are the writing style and the narrative structure. The whole story is told by Death, an omniscient narrator, who stresses how busy its job is between 1939 and 1945. The Death we meet in these pages is quite different from the traditional image, since here it appears not menacing or cruel, but benevolent, deeply attached to the souls it carries lovingly away from the bloody earth and extremely tired of its task. This choice of narrator helps the author hold the story tightly together, as everything is orchestrated by an omniscient narrator (much like in 18th century fiction). This point of view helps human actions appear in all of their grotesqueness, when violence is concerned: ‘I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.’

At the same time, the peculiar device of such an abstract voice allows for the use of imagery and actual poetry that add poignancy to the story without being out of place. There are even illustrations (by Trudy White) and news-flash type, bold centered notes that anticipate what takes place in the following paragraphs, and that serve as epigrams along with the lists of "features" of each chapter. For example, this note is effective in its brevity in telling us the character's intention to help his friend: 

The contents of Rudy's bag: 

    six stale pieces of bread, 

  broken into quarters.

The beauty and power of words are also an underlying theme of the book, as the title points to. Many reviewers talk about Liesel saving books from Nazi campfires (referring to one episode in particular) and the Italian translation of the title, unfortunately, is La ragazza che salvava i libri, coherently with this interpretation. Liesel's status of thief, however, is very important to the story,  as is the fact that she is actually stealing the books. Her first motive is always to take something beautiful and important, and keep it for herself. The power and beauty of words, and of the people who use them, are the key to a haunting story about the tragedy of the holocaust and the War, that manages to be heart-warming and hopeful. The rarity of this combination is what will make The Book Thief a modern classic.

Colm Tòibìn: Brooklyn

If I had to use only one word to describe Colm Tòibìn's novel Brooklyn it would be 'understated'. It's the story of a young girl, Eilis Lacey, who lives in the small Irish town of Enniscorthy with her mother and older sister Rose, in the hard years following World War Two. Her father has died and her brothers have moved to England to work, so the three women are the only ones left in the household. Through an Irish priest living in Brooklyn, Eilis's move to America is arranged, so that she may find a better job and life, while her sister stays behind with their fragile mother. Just when Eilis is starting to make a home for herself in America - thanks to work in a department store and the love of an Italian-American plumber named Tony - devastating news from home unexpectedly calls her back to Ireland. At the end she must decide whether to return to Tony and her new life, or to settle into her hometown, which suddenly seems more appealing than it ever did.

I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but in any case, what makes this novel beautiful isn't so much the story itself, but the way it's written. Tòibìn's writing is gentle and steadily paced. There are no great climaxes in Eilis's story, or rather, they are so well prepared that tension rises steadily throughout the novel. Eilis is an unusual heroine, not the feisty strong-willed girl who one normally finds, typically in young-adult fiction. She is rather passive, never standing up for what she wants, barely knowing what it is she wants most of the time. Her life just seems to gradually "be arranged" for her by her family, father Flood, her employers - who are on the other hand all quite strong characters. Nevertheless, Eilis is a very likeable character, sensitive and honest. The narrator focuses on her the entire time, making us readers root for her from the start. That's what makes her submissiveness all the more heart-wrenching. The writing is simple and the tone controlled. But strong emotions are conjured through a hushed tone of plainness but also humor. This, I think, is one of the novel's strongest features: the tone of humor constantly suppressed. Especially the dialogue can be lightly comic, without indulging in full-fledged jokes: "Well at least you don't look like you've just come in from milking the cows any more" "Did I look like that?" "Just a bit. Nice clean cows". Although Eilis comes through as a character who is never really in control of her life, but rather dominated by circumstance, and although the end is painfully bittersweet, Brooklyn manages to be a story of hope, of things not turning out as expected and of people realizing that that can be ok.
Finally a coming-of-age story that is not overly dramatic. There are no spectacular turning points, no real bad guys, just the daily adventure of making decisions, taking care of each other and facing the unexpected as well as the old and tiresome.
The topic of immigration is dealt with the same way: through stroke after stroke of commonplace trials. It's significant that - having been provided easily with lodgings and workplace by father Flood -  the greatest hardship Eilis has to face is every foreigner's malady: home-sickness. The perspective is also unusual: not the American one, according to which moving to the States is quite simply the natural thing to do, but the painful one of someone who was quite satisfied with her life in the old country to begin with.
This is not only a novel for those who like coming-of-age fiction, historical novels and immigrants' narratives. It's a novel for anyone who can appreciate a moving story that ranges from melancholic to desperate to amusing, and the exquisite writing of a master of his craft.

Andrea Levy: Small Island

My latest read is a little gem by Andrea Levy - British author of Jamaican descent - called Small Island. Published in 2005, this heartfelt novel won both the Orange Prize for fiction and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and is now a two-part BBC drama. The story takes place in 1848, although the plot shifts continuously backward and forward  - as well as from one to the other of the four main characters - so the effect is much like flipping through the pages of a photo album. The story is centered around the difficult encouter between Jamaicans moving to Britain, the Mother Country, - many of them after serving it during World War II - and local British people having to come to terms with an increased wave of immigrants, after having fought foreign peoples for the safety of their nation.
The strongest element in the book are the four main characters, thanks to the way Levy shifts from one's perspective to the other, revealing the motives behind seemingly harsh or cold attitudes, with an eye of compassion and wit. Hortense and Gilbert - along with heartthrob Michael Roberts - are the main Jamaican characters, who we get to know both in their home country (the Small Island of the title - at least, one of them) and when Hortense moves to London to join her husband, whom she barely knows. The hardships and racism they face as blacks in post-war Britain are the counterpoint to another difficult household: their landlords' family, consisting of Queenie and Bernard Bligh. Beautiful Queenie has escaped life as a butcher's daughter only to marry a dull banker. While she is one of the most likeable characters from the start, it takes a shift to his point of view and the retelling of his traumatic experience as an RAF in India to understand and feel compassionate towards the rigid and reserved Bernard.
Far from being an abstract historical inquiry, the novel portrays Colonialism, war, racism and the problems of immigration through the everyday pain that people inflict upon each other. Much like recent literary phenomenon The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Small Island sheds light on a complex historical turning-point with humor and grace. All characters see their dreams and aspirations partly deluded, as they struggle for acceptance in one way or the other. But the novel's outlook is anything but bleak, as the individuals' strength and kindheartedness show the only way for peoples and races to unite. The way these four people struggle to adjust to each other is sometimes fierce, sometimes hilarious, but always achingly human.
The novel is very well plotted, with a tender and unexpected outcome for the two couples. But mostly it's the brilliant characters that make the story come alive, thanks to Levy's linguistic skill that pitches their voices perfectly. If you're into historical fiction, but most of all, if you want a novel that is engrossing, moving and funny, make sure you pick this one up.

Kathleen Kent: The Heretic's Daughter

I devoured this book, recommended by my mother (like many of my books are), in four days. And only because I had a university exam that kept me from spending as much time with it as I would have liked. The Heretic's Daughter is the story of a young girl, Sarah Carrier, who lives in New England during the Salem witch trials. The story actually begins in 1690, two years before the actual trials take place, and gives an in-depth look at two quite different Puritan homes: the Carrier family, with its cold and strict ways, and the Toothakers - the cousins Sarah and her baby sister stay with to escape the smallpox - whose warmth towards the newcomers overshadows a life of superstition and family feuds. As the story unravels we get to know this silent and slightly disturbing protagonist as we see through her eyes the gradual climax of madness. Family going against family, friend against friend in a build-up of malice, superstition and dread. One of the most captivating figures is Martha Carrier, Sarah's mother. Like most characters in this book, she isn't particularly likeable, especially in the beginning, where all we see is her coldness towards her family and her sarcastic attitude towards her neighbors, making life and friendship all the more difficult for her daughter. But gradually her strengh and love seep through, as she bravely faces persecution and death sentenced by the magistrates because of "spectral evidence" of her witchcraft. This isn't a spoiler, because practically from the first pages of the novel (and thanks to the back cover of the book), we know what Martha's end will be and this makes the tension throughout the novel all the more powerful. In fact, a good half of the story goes by without much happening, at least not in the way of withcraft, but since we know what is about to happen every page is like a bomb ticking away under our chair. All the characters are interesting and realistic - not your conventional kind-hearted families, but Puritans made hard by desease, dread, gossip and fear of Indian attacks. The feeling of uneasiness and foreboding grows as we see the first glimpse of what can ensue from a girl's anger and pain, when Mercy Williams joins the Carriers. And the mysterious nature of Sarah's father, with his massive build and hidden past, makes him another source of ambivalent feelings from daughter and reader alike. What makes the novel so powerful, I think, is that it's the true story of the author's grandmother nine generations back. Kathleen Kent's pride and passion show through her re-telling of Martha Carrier's hanging and of the sometimes fierce but always true attachment between her ancestors. That, along with the greatly poetic writing that sets us among the shadows of what seems like a flemish painting, is what makes this not only a great work of historical fiction, but a moving family saga. I detected a trace of bitterness on the author's part, at the possibility of such horror towards dozens of innocent men and women, from a group of people who professed the religion of love and forgiveness (but perhaps for those first harsh Puritans those weren't the two most relevant aspects of Christianity). In fact what Martha tells her daughter before dying isn't a prayer of hope in God's everlasting life, but an entirely earthly and not very Puritan "There is no death in remembrance. Remember me Sarah. Remember me, and part of me will always be with you". This doesn't prevent a deep longing for God and queston about justice, love and truth to emerge from the pages. As well as the tender and kind character of Reverend Dane. He has no power to prevent the hanging, even of his own relatives, but his presence, along with the unyealding love of many others raises the question: o death, where is your victory?