The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Historical Fiction

Summary

Narrated by Death, The Book Thief is the story of Liesel Meminger, a nine-year-
old German girl who given up by her mother to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann in
the small town of Molching in 1939, shortly before World War II. On their way to
Molching, Liesel's younger brother Werner dies, and she is traumatized, experiencing
nightmares about him for months. Hans is a gentle man who brings her comfort and
helps her learn to read, starting with a book Liesel took from the cemetery where her
brother was buried. Liesel befriends a neighborhood boy, Rudy Steiner, who falls in
love with her. At a book burning, Liesel realizes that her father was persecuted for
being a Communist, and that her mother was likely killed by the Nazis for the same
crime. She is seen stealing a book from the burning by the mayor's wife Ilsa Hermann,
who later invites Liesel to read in her library.

Keeping a promise he made to the man who saved his life, Hans agrees to hide a
Jew named Max Vandenberg in his basement. Liesel and Max become close friends, and
Max writes Liesel two stories about their friendship, both of which are reproduced in
the novel. When Hans publicly gives bread to an old Jew being sent to a concentration
camp, Max must leave, and Hans is drafted into the military at a time when air raids
over major German cities were escalating in terms of frequency and fatality. Liesel next
sees Max being marched towards the concentration camp at Dachau. Liesel loses hope
and begins to disdain the written word, having learnt that Hitler's propaganda is to
blame for the war and the Holocaust and the death of her biological family, but Ilsa
encourages her to write. Liesel writes the story of her life in the Hubermanns' basement,
where she miraculously survives an air raid that kills Hans, Rosa, Rudy, and everyone
else on her block. Liesel survives the war, as does Max. She goes on to live a long life
and dies at an old age.

Analysis

The Book of Theif is a book about kindness and cruelty. The Kindness and cruelty are
often juxtaposed. The kindness of Hans helping the jewish man is juxtaposed with the
punishment that is wrought on both of them. The kindest also hurts Max as he is forced
to leave the home. The novel touches on themes of love and loss, and is narrated by
Death, giving it a unique and haunting perspective. Perhaps most significantly, The
Book Thief explores the immense, sometimes contradictory power of language,
including that of the printed word.

Submitted by: Rio A. Goles

Submitted to: Cindy Lyn T. Ortega

 “The French Lieutenant's Woman”

By John Fowles ( 1981)

Romance/Drama

Literature Review of Selected Contemporary Story

According to Valentová (2011), The postmodern themes analysed in The French

Lieutenant’s Woman are History, Author and Authority, and Ontological worlds. This
work concentrates on the depiction of these particular themes and strategies because
they are the most significant and distinctive postmodern elements deployed within the
novel, which, on the one hand, disconnect The French Lieutenant’s Woman from the
Victorian tradition, yet, on the other hand, show how the tradition is continued in the
new context of postmodernism. Such paradoxical and contradictory tendency is
inherent to postmodern art and makes The French Lieutenant’s Woman a remarkable
example of historiographic metafiction, which showed another level of the possibilities
of a novel, and influenced successive authors in their rendering of history and reality.

According to Schnelle (2006) , One of John Fowles’s most famous works, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman (abbreviated FLW in the following) is remarkable in
many ways. The author combines an intriguing story, narrated in the typical Victorian
manner, with a detailed account of Victorian England. Moreover, Fowles also manages
to convey to the reader his actual conviction of how a novel should be written from the
modern author’s stance, while criticizing both the “form-obsessed noveau roman
school” (Huffaker 99) and the shortcomings of Victorian writing-techniques.

Analysis

There is no doubt that the “real” past did exist, but the past that is accessible to
us today is only a narrativized construct made of the empirical past, transmitted in a
textualized form. A novel with substantial academic scrutiny and high readership is
exceptional; in literary study, the canon and its academic defenders frequently centered
on "high literary" works with small readerships. The French Lieutenant's Woman has
undergone numerous academic re-examinations in light of numerous critical and
thematic approaches due to its popularity since publication. In their study of
postmodernism, they described the binary of popular and academic interest as a
paradox similar to the postmodern thematic binaries produced within the novel's
content. The exploration of gender, especially in light of Fowles' assertions that it is a
feminist novel, engagement with metafictional and metahistorical notions, and portrayal
of science and religion are some of the most common criticisms of the book.

Submitted by: Rio A. Goles

Submitted to: Cindy Lyn T. Ortega