Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

A few years ago when my first novel for young adults was published, I met with book pages editor Alisha Sims at the Lethbridge Herald to publicize my book launch. While I was at the Lethbridge Herald offices, Alisha asked if I would be interested in reviewing a book for the newspaper, and she showed me the review copies that had been sent from different publishers. I ended up choosing a copy of Code Name Verity (which had a much different cover than it does now, and I think that the re-release cover is much more appealing than the original that I own), and I ripped through the book in one or two sittings. I am a sucker for WWII books (Postcards from No-Man's Land and Daniel's Story started me on that path) and Code Name Verity is set during its height, concerned mostly with events in 1943. 

Queenie, a Scottish-born special operations operative, is taken by the Gestapo when she accidentally looks for traffic the wrong way when crossing a street in France. She is bound, tortured, and questioned, and her lack of identification papers do not make her story any more plausible. Queenie writes her story down, and believes that as long as she continues to write, she will be kept alive. She starts off writing on the clean, creamy hotel stationary, but soon her story spreads across recipe index cards and a prescription pad for a Jewish doctor. These fragments are all she has, and the power of storytelling is evident (her Gestapo captor calls her Scheherazade after the character in One Thousand and One Nights, telling stories to keep from being executed). She is also under the strict watch of Anna Engel, who translates Queenie's confession for Captain von Linden. 

Queenie's account largely details her friendship with Maddie, a young woman who is a pilot and also Queenie's best friend. So much of the focus is initially on Maddie, that it takes a few chapters to understand that the character "Queenie" in the account is the captive writer herself. The book is carefully, intricately plotted, which is why it is so difficult to talk about in a review - to begin unravelling one thread of the plot means giving away the entirety of another. 

So why am I writing about this book now? The incredible YA Sync program has been releasing a free download of a young adult audio book every week (paired with a free download of an adult audio book) and this past week the available YA title was Code Name Verity. I remembered loving the book when I read it, but I couldn't remember many specific details about it - that's a problem I have with some of the books I love the most, that I speed through them too fast to remember character names and plot, setting and lines. I'm just left with that inarticulate feeling that you get from a truly good book. 

I was so excited for the opportunity to revisit Code Name Verity, this time as an audio book. The audio format made me love the book even more, and made me appreciate much about it that I hadn't in my first read. The references to Peter Pan and the Darlings seemed even more carefully woven throughout, or else I was more audibly attuned to them when listening to the story. And hearing that final "Kiss me, Hardy" line delivered audibly was a million times more affecting (and devastating) than I ever heard it delivered in my head. 

I am so looking forward to next week's YA Sync release, Matthew Quick's Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock. I think that the audio of that book will be so affecting and creative, and I'm looking forward to sharing another audio book review once I've listened to it, too. 

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

This is the second time that I’ve reviewed the lesser known book by an author before the more well-known one, using that review to just mention the well-known book. I reviewed Brian Selznick’s Wonderstruck before The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and then I reviewed Markus Zusak’s The Messenger before The Book Thief. Mostly, this is because because the well-known books – these incredible stories by both Selznick and Zusak – seem almost untouchable because of their notoriety, their recognition through awards (Hugo Cabret picked up the Caldecott and The Book Thief was a Prinz Honor Book), and their popularity with readers.

But then again, to call The Messenger and Wonderstruck “lesser known books” seems a little ridiculous, which goes to show just how important these “well-known books” are.

Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief is a book that is a huge, wild undertaking, and it seems possible to talk about it only in small parts, diving into various meaningful moments because the overarching story is so intricate, complicated, and unparalleled. Even the plot summary is difficult to capture in a paragraph. Narrated by Death during WWII, The Book Thief focuses primarily on young Liesel Meminger, who is herself a self-named “book thief.” Death observes and notes the first time Liesel steals a book, The Grave Digger’s Handbook, which she finds on the day of her brother’s funeral. Liesel is taken in by a foster family, where she learns how to read the books that she finds, steals, and accumulates (and one she rescues from a book burning, risking everything in Nazi Germany because of the draw and magnetism of words). Everything that Liesel knows changes when her foster parents hide a young Jewish man in the basement of their house, when history, politics, and narratives begin to intertwine, drawing Liesel into the stories that she never thought she would be able to live and tell.

Liesel’s relationship with Max, the young Jewish man in the basement, quickly becomes the heart of the story. Or at least he shares that center part, this text and word version of how it is to look at a painting and find that you focus in on certain places and points. Young and not completely understanding of the situation between Germans and Jews, the careful negotiation of the relationship between Liesel and Max is at once heartbreaking and remarkable. Max illustrates a story he entitles The Standover Man on pages of Mein Kampf that he has painted over in white, and Zusak includes this in its entirety at the center of the novel.

Yet, Liesel’s friend Rudy is one of the most affecting characters in the novel. His story is set up using a strange method of revealing: Death frequently reminds the reader that Rudy is going to die. Rudy’s ending is revealed, and the tension comes from the reader having to continue to read the novel in order to get to this ending that we know is coming. Rudy is a vibrant character who “runs like Jesse Owens” and is one of the most brilliant examples of the juxtaposition of youth and war.

And then there is Death’s narration. A device that could be distracting and obvious instead treats the subject matter with the thoughtfulness that it deserves. I was wary of this narration going into the novel, particularly because the only experience I had with Death as a narrator was from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, where it is used much more humorously and ironically. This is different from the first person narratives of WWII that come from novels and memoirs, and different still from the third person narration of present day authors who set their novels during WWII. This is something that sits between the two, an almost-second-person, a perspective that isn’t seen regularly in novels. This difference is exactly what is necessary to insist that this is a new perspective: this is a new way to examine WWII and the Holocaust through literature.  

The reason I think I’ve put off this review, even though this is one book that I would like to share the most, is that not being able to capture it precisely seems to not say anything at all about what this book is. I can’t recommend this book enough, but leaving this review with Zusak’s own writing provides the best reason for reading:

"For now, Rudy and Liesel made their way onto Himmel Street in the rain.

He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book thief without the words.

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain."

Maus by Art Spiegelman

I know that I’m late to reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus. It has been one of those glaring omissions from the books that I’ve read, one of those admissions to, “What really canonical important novels haven’t you read?” I had always been meaning to read the graphic novels (and I’m actually only one in – I picked up volume one, My Father Bleeds History, from a secondhand bookstore, but the other volume was no where to be found), but other books seemed to take priority. It was just luck that I was able to find a copy of the book the other day, but finally reading Maus now seems really convenient. 2011 overlaps with the twenty-fifth anniversary of publication, which coincides with the October release of MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (the book also includes a section of rejection letters Spiegelman received when sending Maus to publishing houses). And because of this recent publication, Spiegelman has been back in the spotlight, with interviews cropping up in major newspapers. They are all really great to read, particularly his interview with the Guardian where Spiegelman says, “Having a writer in the family is to have a traitor in it; it's basic to the project.” So everything is really going on with Maus again right now, and it seems like a happy miracle that I found the book now to read.

Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. It is recounted through a series of interviews between Spiegelman and his father, which reveal a frustration between father and son that speaks towards a relationship that does not appear completely in the novel. The graphic novel form casts the Jewish characters as mice and the Nazis as cats, and these representations both refigure the events of the Holocaust while also changing nothing (Polish characters are drawn as pigs, and Americans as dogs). As Spiegelman meets regularly with his father at his New York apartment, he pieces together the history that is related to him at each meeting. The story meanders, backtracks, and loops at times (and this occurs because when Spiegelman’s interruptions cause his father to scold him for confusing the order in which things are told), which is underlined by the conditions under which Spiegelman’s father tells the story. At times father and son walk and talk, but mostly their meetings occur while Spiegelman’s father rides an exercise bike in the apartment. All of this present action precludes and influences the story of the Holocaust that Spiegelman is so interested in, reconnecting with his father in order to find out the details of his personal experience. The story unravels from the early 1930s to the relocation of Spiegelman’s parents to Auschwitz in the 1940s, at which point the second volume continues the story.

I was fascinated by the structure of the movement between present and past, between listening and telling, particularly for what it reveals about Spiegelman‘s father during the process. The present Vladek lives with his second wife Mala, who is also a survivor of the Holocaust. He treats her like a servant, and is impatient, controlling, and erratic in his relationship with her. He yells at her when she hangs up his son’s coat (“Acch, Mala! A wire hanger you give him! I haven’t seen Artie in almost two years – we have plenty wooden hangers” [and the two year gap in their visits seems to signal early the relationship between father and son]), and complains when she cooks dinner (“Pfeh – the chicken was, I thought, too dry…I tell you, with Mala I don’t know what to do. She –“). But these vagaries of Vladek’s present relationship and life, which are introduced before returning to the events of the Holocaust, cast a light backwards on the rest of the book. It becomes a way of reading with the end in mind, and knowing that Vladek’s character in the present may influence or change the way he describes his character in the past to his son. He has the ability to construct a past character, and the reader has the ability to see him as a present character, and understand how that might change the construction of the past.

I am, of course, looking for the second volume, and am a little bit disappointed that I didn’t just find MetaMaus and buy that instead. To look for a sequel to this novel seems strange, particularly because as a reader, I know it will take me right back into the suffering and difficulty of the first volume. However, Spiegelman’s past/present construction seems to make this important, and his characterization of the father/son relationship in the present makes this even more effective. I’m late in reading this story, but I’m glad I finally did pick it up, and I’m eager to see what comes next.