There is no better trick to achieve a bestseller than to convincingly combine a story that can move between the waters of a children's or youth plot and at the same time with enough substance to also be read by the adult audience.
Markus Zusak He achieved it with that great book "The Book Thief." A novel soaked by the inexhaustible torrent of Anne Frank, and very much in tune with "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" by John boyne (curiously, both publications concentrated between 2005 and 2006).
The contrast between early childhood and the most ominous animosity of Nazism becomes a recurring argument on which that plot appears from time to time that brings a new focus, towards that idea of ​​sublimation of the miseries of our civilization.
The point is that this undeniable success has come around the world, Markus Zusak has had the opportunity to prolong a literary career that already came from several previous novels without much repercussion and that now extends with that incomparable endorsement of the bestseller confirmed with new recognized novels and awarded with various awards of considerable relevance.
And the fact is that when a good writer gets that time to write exclusively (as explained by Rosa Regás when she won the Planet), he always ends up polishing the job. Thus, Markus Zusak is already that ratified writer beyond his great editorial pitch. And may it remain so ...
Top 3 Recommended Books by Markus Zusak
The book Thief
As readers or viewers, we have a tendency to value an emotional narrative proposal more, whenever it emerges from the ignominious, from the dehumanized. It is about empathizing with those who suffer or suffered cruelty to let those absolutely frank emotions come out, without artifice or easy sentimentality.
The idea of ​​a dictatorial regime capable of genocide as a master plan seems so remote in today's Europe that its observation in a retroaction of not so many years makes your skin crawl. In a few days in which books contrary to Nazi ideology were burned in bonfires like insane covens, little Liesel takes shelter in her own books, from which she composes her own plot, her story, the experiences of an innocent being who glimpses , from his still short reason, the great distance between the colorful imagination of childhood and the devastating gray that it can reach in adulthood.
World War II and one of those stories that could easily have happened in the middle of catastrophe.
Crossed letters
The inertia of everyday life plunges us into that mediocrity of citizens who adjust to norms, uses and customs. That's what Ed is up to, a young taxi driver represented as an ordinary guy, with his daily problems and his usual escape routes around friends and so on.
Ed's conversion to a quirky superhero happens from a turning point that could happen to anyone at any given time. Ed manages to avoid a bank robbery, in the manner of an improvised Superman who appears in the right place at the most appropriate time.
But what appears in history as a coincidence ends up composing a singular review of superhero stories, perhaps more in the style of The protégé, with that touch of improvisation in some powers, faculties or connections that more naturalize the hero of the day and that serves a greater empathy from which to draw more human juice to the idea of ​​doing good.
His role as a hero is linked by a series of letters from the specific event of the frustrated robbery. But the best of all is that his heroic interventions end up landing in the most everyday, in people's most basic problems, in the losses and labyrinths of modern humans, even in the impossibility of love...
Clay's bridge
The truth is that Markus has not been a lavish author since his great publishing success. Reissues of novels written previously have been filling that gap left by a new bestselling author.
But now Markus returns with an intense story. The Dunbars are poor street kids, without parents to take care of them and faced with the cruelty of the street that the rest of the kids only know after the usual family protection process.
However, perhaps that upbringing in the world, without the tinsel of childhood, ends up giving them freedom in the face of the abyss. A freedom that can end up pushing them or guiding them towards the truest understanding of the world.
Clay is one of the five abandoned brothers and it is he who guides us through the destiny undertaken by all those brothers, necessarily supported by each other but also exposed to all kinds of risks.
The unexpected return of the father places them in a muddy terrain between the need for love and the most intense and even aggressive drives of repudiation and misunderstanding. And only Clay can end up bridging those two sides of the life that is and the life that should have been. Only the current between the two banks may be too strong for a makeshift foundation ...
