Author Marcus Zusak admits his novel, The Book Thief, seems like an unlikely bestseller.
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Marcus Zusak says he's always amazed when people recommend his novel The Book Thief (Macmillan, $23.99) to their friends. He certainly never expected the book - a departure from the young adult fiction he was known for - to become a bestseller around the world.
"It's been a shock," admits the Sydney-based author. "As I was writing it I thought no one was going to read it. At reader events I still thank people for picking it up. It's set in Nazi Germany, narrated by Death, nearly everyone dies, it's over 500 pages long - it's a tough read to recommend."
But while The Book Thief is sad (at one point I had to put down my copy because I was sobbing so much I couldn't see the pages) it is never depressing. In fact, it's the most extraordinary novel I've read in a long time. It's the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl cast adrift in Nazi Germany. She's fostered by the Hubermann family and, through the books she begins to steal from burnings and other people's shelves, she creates her own safe little place in the basement of their home. Then a desperate Jewish man takes refuge in the basement and Liesel becomes caught up in his struggle for survival.
Zusak has managed to write about an exceptionally ugly period in history with extraordinary beauty. "That's what I set out to do," he explains. "I realised this was such a grim and terrible time and I was searching for the pockets of beauty that were there - the families who hid Jewish people, the parents who didn't want their kids to go to special Hitler camps. Those were the stories I wanted to tell."
The question is why a young man living in a bright, hopeful city like Sydney found himself drawn to write about such a bleak time and place.
"I guess the truth is when I was growing up it was like a piece of that world came into our home every now and then," explains Zusak who has an Austrian mother and German father. "My parents would tell these stories about cities on fire, running to bomb shelters and Jewish people being marched through the streets to concentration camps."
Zusak intended the book to be a novella but it grew bigger and broader in scope. Its central theme is the power of words. "On the one hand Hitler is destroying people with words and Liesel is stealing words back and using them to create her own world," the author explains.
The Book Thief has changed everything for Zusak who once worked as a casual high school teacher and had a cleaning job in a doctor's surgery.
"Everything happened at once," he recalls. "The book came out in America and all of a sudden it went crazy. For the past two years it's been coming out gradually all over the world which has been fantastic."
However, The Book Thief has also created a problem. It's such a special novel, almost certainly destined to be a classic, so how on earth is Zusak going to follow it? Not easily, as it turns out. The author's new book, Bridge of Clay, ought to have been delivered to his publisher back in January. Currently he's in the process of starting it again.
"People have said, 'You don't have to write a better book, just write a different book'. But I... realised it's not true. The Book Thief is my fifth book and with all the previous ones I had thought, I want to write a better book. So I'm going to give it... everything like I did in The Book Thief. People can hate the book but they can't accuse it of having no ideas."
Zusak says he thinks this is a more ambitious work than The Book Thief. It's quite literally about a boy called Clay who decides to build a bridge and the idea for it has been knocking around in his head for 10 years or so. "This is the book I was pinning my hopes on and The Book Thief took me by surprise,' he explains.
The creative process is never easy for Zusak. "There are writers [for whom] it just flows out. I have to drag myself to the desk because I'm so filled with doubt. In the end you've got to get to the point where you think, if I'm going to fail I'll do it in a blaze of glorious failure."
