The Book Thief

"I’d like to talk about The Book Thief . I’ll start with a tiny bit of background to the story. It follows a girl called Liesel, the eponymous book thief of the title, and her life in Nazi Germany. It starts when she’s about nine and follows her for the next six years. It’s a story about mortality, love and language. The thing that makes it unique, and obviously relevant to this conversation, is that it’s narrated by Death , who appears to have synaesthesia. We’re told in the prologue that when he comes to claim people, the sky is a particular colour depending on the person and that Death can taste the sky. We know that from the very start because he describes this chocolate-coloured sky. I think he says something like, “I do, however, try to enjoy every colour I see – the whole spectrum, a billion or so flavours, none of them quite the same, and the sky to slowly suck on.” It’s been a while since I read this book, but I remember that line very clearly. “It’s so evocative and a really effective way of using synaesthesia as a literary device in this case, of providing a different way of describing things” My reading of it is that this idea, that colours reflect the emotion of the human, say something about their character. There’s a lot of food imagery throughout – from the chocolate that we hear about in the beginning to the recurring image of a sky that’s red as soup and has crumbs and pepper in it, and, later the horizon being the colour of milk and cold and fresh and poured amongst the bodies. Other emotions take on other things. He talks about fear being shiny and silver. It’s so unusual and so evocative and a really effective way of using synaesthesia as a literary device in this case, of providing a different way of describing things."