{"id":11,"date":"2012-01-25T16:06:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T05:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/?page_id=11"},"modified":"2012-01-27T15:51:49","modified_gmt":"2012-01-27T04:51:49","slug":"markus-zusak-interview","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/interviews\/markus-zusak-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Markus Zusak Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

I believe this interview was written in 2006. It was done for the US Bookseller and Publisher, although the published version underwent a very heavy copyedit and actually bore very little relationship to what I wrote (or what Markus said!). Anyway, water under the bridge, this is the original draft as submitted.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I first met Markus Zusak, about 6 years ago, he was beginning to get a lot of attention as an important new voice in YA fiction. Still in his early twenties (although he wrote his first\u2014unpublished\u2014novel when he was 16), Markus\u2019s Wolf brothers novels\u2014The Underdog<\/em>, Fighting Reuben Wolf<\/em> and Getting the Girl<\/em>\u2014were being acclaimed for their fresh take on suburban masculinity at a time when anxiety about boys and reading was at its peak. He impressed me then, as he does today, as thoughtful, intelligent and slightly reserved, yet open and generous in talking about himself and his work.<\/p>\n

Now, at the age of 30, Markus has won a number of highly prestigious literary awards, including, most recently, an honour book in the Printz award for I Am the Messenger<\/em>. Learning about this honour was, he says, a ridiculously great moment<\/em>\u2014it took him a week before he could bring himself to delete the message from the Printz committee off his answering machine. It follows the acclaim the novel achieved in Australia, where it took out the Children\u2019s Book Council Book of the Year award for older readers, as well as several prestigious state literary awards.<\/p>\n

Markus, who has worked variously as a cleaner, teacher and tutor of struggling high school students, writes full-time, which is remarkable given his age and relatively small output. It wasn\u2019t one big break that allowed him to do this, more just a steady build-up over four years. I also do school talks and workshops at different times during a year.<\/em><\/p>\n

The appeal of Markus\u2019s early books, at least in Australia, were in part due to their honest appraisal of working class life in the suburbs\u2014which is the milieu Markus comes from. PW readers may recall that Australia\u2019s sunny reputation took a battering late last year when race riots erupted in Sydney\u2019s southern suburbs\u2014an area known collectively to Sydneysiders as The Shire. The Shire is the closest Australia has to a monoculture: it is predominantly populated by Anglo-Celtic Australians, and the riots were between white locals and \u201coutsiders\u201d from a mostly Middle Eastern background.<\/p>\n

Markus grew up in The Shire, and he\u2019s moved back there to live, after spending some years living in a highly multi-cultural area of Sydney. \u201cI figure they need more people with names like Zusak down there\u201d, he observed with a wry grin as we walked to find a quiet coffee shop on a busy shopping strip. Markus is the son of immigrants from Austria and Germany\u2014his mother, like Leisel, the protagonist of his new novel The Book Thief<\/em>, grew up in Munich in circumstances similarly difficult to Leisel\u2019s.<\/p>\n

As young post-WWII immigrants, Markus\u2019s parents arrived in Australia with little English, and he says that his parents weren\u2019t really book people\u2014except in the sense that they encouraged their four children to be. (I\u2019ve got every Dr Seuss book there is!<\/em>) They are, however, storytellers, and The Book Thief<\/em> found its initial inspiration in two stories Markus remembers being told as a child. The first was of a story his mother told of Munich being bombed; Everything was red, like the sky was on fire. That was a memory that I could see really clearly as a child, a very visual image<\/em>. The second story was of a teenage boy who, like the character Hans Hubermann in The Book Thief<\/em>, took pity on an emaciated Jew being forced through the streets, and offered him some bread. Both the elderly Jewish man and the teenage boy were whipped by a soldier who witnessed this act of compassion.<\/p>\n

Markus originally planned The Book Thief <\/em>to be a novella\u2014about a hundred pages\u2014based on these two memories, but once I started writing\u2014it took three years to write\u2014one thing turned into another. Once the ideas came they wouldn\u2019t stop.<\/em><\/p>\n

Early in the novel, after she commits her first book theft (she finds a copy of \u201cThe Gravedigger\u2019s Handbook\u201d in the snow by her young brother\u2019s grave) Leisel goes to live with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, in a small town outside Munich after her communist father is taken away to a concentration camp. A few years after Leisel comes to live with them, Hubermann and his wife Rosa (she of the most creative invective), take into hiding a young Jewish man, the son of Hans\u2019 friend, a fellow soldier who was killed in WWI. The relationship between Leisel and Max, the Jew hiding in her basement, forms an emotional and thematic core to the novel. It\u2019s this aspect that ties The Book Thief<\/em> to Markus\u2019s earlier, contemporary fiction\u2014relationships have always been of great interest in his novels.<\/p>\n

A striking feature of The Book Thief<\/em> is its first person narration by Death. Zusak says this was his first choice for the narration, as he felt a novel set in Nazi Germany\u2014terrain many before have covered\u2014needed something original to set it apart. That original idea was elusive at first, so he put the idea for the book aside and worked on some other pieces. I wrote the sentence, \u201cI have seen the colour of time on three occasions\u201d<\/em>, he explained. I wrote this about three deaths, and Death himself was the narrator<\/em>. The idea of Death narrating a story about war immediately made sense to him.<\/p>\n

Markus went on to describe the process, then, of pinning down Death\u2019s voice; In the beginning, I had death enjoying his work too much, and he was saying all these macabre things, and it wasn\u2019t working. Then I tried Leisel in first person, then I went to third, because my first person Leisel, she was an Australian teenager sitting in a German prison cell<\/em>. (The first draft of the novel had Leisel being arrested for her book thievery.) So he took a break from writing\u2014and then the last line of the novel came to him, and at last he had the essence of who his narrator was. When I thought of that last line, I thought to myself, that\u2019s it, that\u2019s what\u2019s been wrong the whole time. What if Death\u2019s scared of us?<\/em><\/p>\n

Finding Death\u2019s voice was crucial to making the novel work. The language of the book is striking for its oft-times surprising word choices, particularly in the way Death uses language to describe his relationship with the human world: I did want Death to talk in a way that humans don\u2019t speak. One thing I stood by <\/em>(in the editing process) was when Death says things like \u201cthe trees who stood\u201d or \u201cthe sky who was this colour\u201d. So he refers to the sky and the trees and the clouds as if they\u2019re colleagues of his. I would also say that those elements of language is also just how I love to write. I love books like <\/em>The Bell Jar. Every page has a gem on it. And that\u2019s what I love about writing.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Book <\/em>Thief is characterised by short, episodic chapters. Life is episodic, and so that\u2019s what I like to write. These little things can mean a lot. Things are revealed in a small moment, and it goes back to this small moment, and this one\u2014hopefully<\/em>. <\/em>Markus planned the novel by listing, in a notebook such as he uses for each of his novels, the chapter titles and playing with their order. (He later writes the novel on a computer either in his workroom or sometimes I\u2019ll relocate to the kitchen if I don\u2019t feel like clearing the desk<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Markus, who grew up speaking German\u2014A rough, working class German, as in the book<\/em>\u2014is at pains to make it clear that while the novel involves German characters sympathetic to and supportive of Jews, isn\u2019t a pro-German tract, nor an apologia: I\u2019m not trying to get people to re-examine their views on Nazi Germany. All I\u2019m trying to do, like every writer does, is to tell a story that hasn\u2019t been told in this way before. The stories I heard when I was young\u2014my mum\u2019s father didn\u2019t want to fly the flag on Hitler\u2019s birthday. He hated Hitler. Obviously I\u2019m not saying every German was like that. I\u2019m saying here\u2019s an individual story that can be told. It\u2019s the hope to examine one small story in the big story that we already know.<\/em><\/p>\n

An interesting fact about The Book Thief<\/em> is that in Australia, it is being promoted by Pan Macmillan (and widely acclaimed since its publication in September 2005) as Zusak\u2019s first adult novel, whereas in the USA, Random House has chosen to publish it on their YA imprint. It\u2019s a situation that Markus is comfortable with: For a teenage audience, it\u2019s clearly for sophisticated readers, and I think there\u2019s a need for that. Adult or young adult, hopefully it\u2019s good. You just hope it gets into the right person\u2019s hands, whatever their age.<\/em><\/p>\n

As far as what Markus hopes those readers will take from the book, he says I want them to be affected by the characters, and I want them to love the characters, and if I have achieved that, I\u2019ve given them something meaningful. <\/em>At the same time, Markus hopes that readers will appreciate his attempt at writing a different style of book; Whether it worked or not, you just want people to see the attempt, that you\u2019ve tried, and that you did try to give them something fresh and meaningful, and something that was able to move them.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I believe this interview was written in 2006. It was done for the US Bookseller and Publisher, although the published version underwent a very heavy copyedit and actually bore very little relationship to what I wrote (or what Markus said!). … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":7,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"sidebar-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-11","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1219,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11\/revisions\/1219"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}