"Some people might tell you that books are no longer necessary now that we have the internet. Don’t believe them. Books help us know other people, know how the world works, and, in the process, know ourselves more deeply in a way that has nothing to with what you read them on and everything to do with the curiosity, integrity and creative restlessness you bring to them.We read The Book Thief in my KCLS Book Group in Maple Valley, and everyone loved it, which is pretty rare for my group. Now a movie has been made from this popular novel, and Shelf Awareness' Jennifer Brown breaks it down for those who loved the book, giving a clear perspective on the film so readers can decide if they want to go and see it or wait until it comes out on DVD.
Books build bridges to the lives of others, both the characters in them and your countless fellow readers across other lands and other eras, and in doing so elevate you and anchor you more solidly into your own life. They give you a telescope into the minds of others, through which you begin to see with ever greater clarity the starscape of your own mind.
And though the body and form of the book will continue to evolve, its heart and soul never will. Though the telescope might change, the cosmic truths it invites you to peer into remain eternal like the Universe.
In many ways, books are the original internet — each fact, each story, each new bit of information can be a hyperlink to another book, another idea, another gateway into the endlessly whimsical rabbit hole of the written word. Just like the web pages you visit most regularly, your physical bookmarks take you back to those book pages you want to return to again and again, to reabsorb and relive, finding new meaning on each visit — because the landscape of your life is different, new, “reloaded” by the very act of living."
Bringing The Book
Thief to the Big Screen
by Jennifer Brown
The Book Thief is
a story of children swept up in war. Death, who
narrates, takes an
interest in the vibrantly alive Liesel. In the novel,
we see her through
Death's eyes. In the film, the voice of Death opens
and closes the
story, and breaks into the film perhaps half a dozen
times. But we see
the atrocities of World War II
firsthand--Kristallnacht,
the carting off of neighbors, Jewish prisoners
marched through
the streets. Readers can put down the book, take a
break. But
moviegoers cannot escape the images of cruelty.
In the book, Death
enables our relationship with Leisel. In the movie,
Death must move
out of the way. Director Brian Percival reminds
viewers--through
aerial shots--that we are seeing events through a wider
lens; we see what
Death sees. Yet there is beauty in the film, too. The
laughter of
children playing, the pleasures of a snowball fight. The
secret kindnesses
bestowed onto Liesel by Hans (played with such nuance
by Geoffrey Rush),
the slow thaw of icy Rosa (portrayed brilliantly by
Emily Watson).
Earlier this
month, Markus Zusak and Brian Percival spoke with Thelma
Adams of Yahoo
Movies at New York City's School of Visual Arts Theater
in Chelsea. Zusak
recalled that he and his wife went on one of their
twice-yearly
outings to the movies (they have a two-year-old and a
seven-year-old) to
see Monsieur Lazhar, with Sophie Nélisse as
Alice
L'Écuyer. "She'd make a great Leisel," Zusak told his
wife.
"You should
tell them," his wife replied. Brian Percival said that he
and his team saw
1,000 girls, between self-tapes and casting directors.
"Leisel had
to be both feisty and vulnerable," he said. They flew
Nélisse
and three other girls for a test in Berlin.
Nélisse
is 13 years old, yet her emotional range, conveyed just
by the curling of
her lip or a twinkle in her eye, is mesmerizing.
The Book Thief
author Markus Zusak (center) with director Brian Percival
(r.) on the Berlin
movie set.
Zusak is pleased
with the film. If he misses one moment, it's the scene
in the book when
Liesel sees Max wearing a Star of David and being
marched through
the streets by the Nazis and she recites to him "The
Standover
Man"--the story Max wrote and left for her in the painted-over
pages of Mein
Kampf. But Zusak feels he also gained a scene that he had
not written in the
book: when Max tells Leisel that everything that
lives knows
"the secret word for life."
Zusak feels as
though he was "a different version" of himself when he
wrote The Book
Thief. "There are things I'd change, but that could take
away the spirit of
the book," Zusak said. He's had 10 years of being
with the book,
writing it, publishing it, bringing it to film. "I
thought this would
be my least successful book,"
Zusak said.
"This book's given me everything. I wrote four books before,
but I'm the writer
of The Book Thief." He's been writing for the past
six to seven
years, but hasn't finished another book. "I didn't want to
be a dad who goes
away," he said. "But I need to block the world out; I
have to become the
author of something else now."
Zusak's parents
couldn't speak English when they moved to Australia. His
mother cleans
houses; his father is a housepainter. And they told their
four children
stories.
"To have one
great storyteller in your life, you're lucky," said Zusak.
"But to have
two is amazing. They taught me how to write, how to tell a
story, because of
their love of stories. I had a huge appetite for those
stories, just as
Leisel does." Zusak believes his mother and father
would not have
told their children those stories if they still lived in
Europe.
"There's one
story that didn't make it into the book," Zusak said.
"After the
war, Mom's town was occupied by Americans, Dad's by the
Russians. My
father and his friends were stealing things from the
Russian camp, then
they'd run. One day, a Russian truck stopped, and a
man got out. He
stopped, looked at my father, walked up to him, touched
his face and said,
'Kind'--child. It suggests what he'd seen and left
behind. He got back
in his truck and drove off." Zusak paused. "A book
is built on what
didn't make it in. That's also what holds it up."
This reader missed
Death's voice in the film. But Percival explained
that he had to
show, not tell. "You can't keep inserting Death's voice.
That would
interfere with our relationship with Leisel," he said. He's
right. He added,
"You have to see it from Death's point of view, rather
than hear
it."
Maybe a film is
also built on what doesn't make it in. Because the movie
ends the way all
who loved the book need it to end, and the sparing use
of Death's voice
makes its appearance at the conclusion that much
stronger.
--Jennifer M. Brown
I am finished Alice Hoffman's "The Dovekeepers" and I must say that I am surprised at my fascination with the early Christian era and the plight of the Jewish people during Masada. Books about battles and war usually leave me cold, as do books about religion, fantatics, zealots and other forms of craziness. Fortunately, these subjects turn to gold in the deft hands of Hoffman, who tells us the story of four women and their trials of the heart as an outline to the wars that take place, and the women's ability to survive famine, war, rape and death makes for page-turning reading. In other words, I was already past page 325 before I looked at the clock and realized that hours had passed.
Hoffman has two other books, Green Angel and Green Witch that I've read recently that were equally mesmerizing, though those slim volumes were YA books about a dystopian world where a young woman finds her powers of growth and healing are her ticket to adult society. The prose in those books are glorious and poetic, and while Dovekeepers prose is beautiful, it has to be a bit more straightforward because of the historical subject matter.
Nevertheless, I highly recommend all three books, and I've renewed my love of Hoffman's work because of them. An A all around, and well deserved at that, for these modern classics.
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