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Original poster

Is there anyone else on here who didn't love The Book Thief?

264 replies

TunipTheVegedude · 07/07/2013 20:54

I was told to persevere with it and I'm now 63% through and it's annoying me more than ever.
I'm finding it pretentious and dull and while some of the characters are fine, the girl is totally unconvincing - she reads like someone has sat down and decided on some interesting characteristics to give her ('I know! I'll make her good at fighting and football!') rather than the character growing naturally.
Is it going to get better in the last 37%?

OP posts:
Original poster
TunipTheVegedude · 08/07/2013 17:09

Thank you!

I get what you are saying.

OP posts:
MadameDefarge · 08/07/2013 17:06

Its where the concept of the book overrides the experience of it.

"I want to write a book about the holocaust, and I am going to use one central conceit to carry my philosophical apercues, and to make sure everybody knows what I am talking about I am going to use every overused concept to do with childhood, war and the holocaust, and draw upon magical realistic techniques to underline the ambiguity of the experience of reality in situations of horror. I will make a really good plot plan and I will stick to it. I will overwrite it, however, and lose the heart of my story through my concentration on technique.

It was, at heart, an empty experience for me. I think the author drowned the book in cleverness and faux naivity.

Original poster
TunipTheVegedude · 08/07/2013 16:59

How do you mean, Madame?

OP posts:
MadameDefarge · 08/07/2013 16:58

I think it has an essential lack of integrity that was insulting.

BOF · 08/07/2013 16:56

Cote- I am pulling your leg, lighten up.

MadameDefarge · 08/07/2013 16:56

book thief vair disappointing. Boy with striped pajamas, however, superb.

The book thief seemed to me a book by creative writing course numbers...

LRDLearningKnigaBook · 08/07/2013 16:54
Confused

Is the Book Thief actually shorter than 1000 words?

Or do you always need the Readers' Digest version?

I thought that post was really pertinent. I don't follow why it should be dismissed just because it isn't a twitter-length soundbite.

CoteDAzur · 08/07/2013 16:51

BOF - So, basically, you have come and said that we didn't get The Book Thief, and that it must have gone over our heads. And now rather than explain what you meant, you want people to read a 1000-word essay about snobbery.

Brilliant Grin

LRDLearningKnigaBook · 08/07/2013 16:50

Don't worry, you can simply write me off as one of those ignorant medievalists who doesn't know Proper Lit.

Nothing I study ever won the Booker, so god knows it must be crap. Grin

Hullygully · 08/07/2013 16:49
LRDLearningKnigaBook · 08/07/2013 16:49

Really, yes.

Hullygully · 08/07/2013 16:49

Didn't Daktarin do safari type stuff?

BOF · 08/07/2013 16:48

I was delving into a bit of Daktarin the other day. I only saw the stuff about warts though.

Hullygully · 08/07/2013 16:47

Really lrd?

It makes complete sense to me...

Hullygully · 08/07/2013 16:46

So even more simply, books are linked into genres by their authors' world views and the form this then takes.

LRDLearningKnigaBook · 08/07/2013 16:46

Yeah, that doesn't help me. Not even a teeny bit.

Put simply, I think it's a bollocksy way of over-reifying parlour-game attempts to categorise things.

But excuse me if you think it's brilliant. I'm sure you're right.

Hullygully · 08/07/2013 16:45

Soz, Medvedev is in there because Bakhtin built on his concept.

Original poster
TunipTheVegedude · 08/07/2013 16:45

Yes, Maus is brilliant.

OP posts:
Hullygully · 08/07/2013 16:44

Put simply, genre, said Medvedev, ?is a specific way of visualising a given part of reality,? It is not a generative grammar, it cannot be broken down and analysed into determinable component parts, but is, as Bakhtin described it, a ?form-shaping ideology,? a way of seeing the world that develops as a result of the author?s experience of the world.

(Paraphrased from me)

Original poster
TunipTheVegedude · 08/07/2013 16:44

I just went off to Google and couldn't make head or tail of it Blush

OP posts:
HomeHelpMeGawd · 08/07/2013 16:44

If you'd like to read other books about the Holocaust, I've always thought that Maus by Art Spiegelman and The Last of the Just by Andre Schwarz Bart are staggeringly good.

LRDLearningKnigaBook · 08/07/2013 16:42

Which is?

I will admit I have read quite a lot of Bakhtin and got DH to explain it to me when I suspect the translation of being piss-poor, and I still have no clue what he might have said or meant about genre.

I liked the bit where he talked about piss-ups having cultural significance as 'carnivalesque' episodes. :-)

Hullygully · 08/07/2013 16:39

I prefer Bakhtin's definition of genre.

LRDLearningKnigaBook · 08/07/2013 16:37

Regrettably, that might go in the 'not so highbrow' pile, baby. Grin

But I agree with hully. Everything isn't equally good, but dismissing something because of it's genre or because it was written for the YA market just seems mean-spirited to me.

FWIW I can't get into Book Thief at all - I'd like to say I loved it but I had a look in Waterstones earlier and it makes me itch just flipping through it. I'm entirely willing to believe that's me, though.

BOF · 08/07/2013 16:37

Yes, shite is shite. But I still find it rude and bizarrely up one's own arse to loudly dismiss the taste of people one clearly considers to be intellectual am?bae.

Unless it's about 50 Shades Of Grey, of course.

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