Devil in the White City Blog

Over break, I started reading (and still am reading) Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. It takes place in Chicago, before and during the Chicago’s World Fair of 1893. The book tracks the lives of two very different men, one an influential Chicago architect, the other, a serial killer. At the point where I am in the book, they haven’t met just yet, but it’s only a matter of time until they do.

The book introduces the architect, Daniel Hudson Burnham, as well as his business partner, John Wellborn Root. They were most well known for the homes that they build for wealthy stockyard owners, as well as early skyscrapers. Once their architectural firm had taken off and when the Fair was announced to be in Chicago, they were charged with designing the White City.

Next, the killer is introduced. In his hometown, he is known as Herman Webster Mudgett, but he changed it in Chicago to H. H. Holmes. In the book, he is described as a handsome and intelligent looking young man, but we shouldn’t judge this book by his cover. He devised a scheme to get money from insurance policies taken from people that had died or their families. In his time in the White City, he had many opportunities to find victims and he definitely took them.

I loved the way that the book introduced the “good guy” and the “bad guy” according to their physical attributes. He compared them by their eyes, their stature, the way they carried themselves, etc. But from there he completely veers off, and their similarities dissipate. I wonder if he’ll establish any other connections further down the road.

Heart of Darkness Post

I’ve been trying to read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It’s very slow going, but I like what I’ve been reading so far. The thing that makes it such a slow read is they way that it’s divided. It’s written in huge paragraphs that take up half a page, and very little dialogue, because the story is told by a man who lived it. It’s a story about adventure, and sailing away. The main character, Marlow,  is telling a story of how he came to be a captain on a steamboat on an expedition in Africa. He is hired by a Belgian company, and begins his trek to Africa. Marlow’s steamboat is somewhere in inland Africa, but needs serious repairs after it got sunken. Because of this, Marlow’s stuck in a port (or the Central Station) on the African coast. There, he meets the general manager, who's a rather sketchy character.

I think the book itself is a look into the times during which it was written. In the story, most of the natives living in the area were enslaved by the whites that were industrializing that part of Africa (or at least trying to). Seeing them chained up, worked to the brink of death really shook Marlow, and should've shaken anyone else. The book itself was published in 1902, and even though slavery had been abolished nearly everywhere else in the world, it still existed in Africa.

I also thought that the author of the book had a very interesting history himself. He was born in Poland in 1857 as Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (and later changed it to Joseph Conrad, because it was easier to pronounce-maybe), but later his family was exiled to Russia because his father was arrested for patriotic conspiracy (at the time, Poland had been cut up between Austria, Prussia and Russia, and was completely gone from world maps for over a century. Any type of patriotism in any part of what was under the control of the other countries was prohibited.) After his parents died, he moved back to live with relatives in Poland, and once was old enough, left Poland for good to go to sea. There he developed his love and thirst for finding new worlds and adventure, and he sailed all over the world, from the Middle East, to Austrialia, etc. And he definitely seemed like an interesting character, even without his traveling stories. He possibly was involved in smuggling arms to the Spanish, he even shot himself in the chest, recovered, and became a captain of a British ship. Later he became a British citizen, visited America, and before he died, denied a knighthood. He definitely would’ve been an interesting person to have at a dinner party (if those are still a thing).

Jasper Jones Blog (late post)

A couple days ago, I picked up a book called Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey. Jasper Jones isn’t the protagonist of the story, but he might as well be. The actual protagonist is named Charles Bucktin. He and Jasper don’t usually speak; Charlie is bullied on the regular, and Jasper is basically treated like he doesn’t exist. This whole story takes places somewhere in rural Australia during the 1960’s, in a mining town called Corrington. Everyone knows each other there, and news spreads there like wildfire.

Basically, the story starts with Charlie, reading a book in his room in the middle of the night in the middle of the Australian summer. He’s startled by Jasper Jones coming and knocking on his window and asking Charlie to come with him. And so, Charlie follows Jasper as they go traipsing through the woods to get to Jasper’s hideout where there’s an awful secret waiting to come out.

What I really noticed about Jasper and Charlie is the contrast between their characters. Charlie has a much more privileged life in comparison to Jasper. Compared to Jasper, he has two parents who care for him (even if his mother treats him like he’s five), he lives in a nice house surrounded by books which only nurture his dream of becoming a writer. Jasper is the total opposite. He basically lives alone because his drunkard father is too busy spending all of their money on liquor to care about his son. Jasper learns to be self-sufficient at the age of 14. His childhood is taken slowly away from him. In terms of this, Charlie loses his innocence and childhood in an instant with what Jasper shows him (I’m not going to give away any spoilers).

The book also confronts racial issues because of the fact that Jasper is half Aboriginal and half white. Because of this the town regards him as less and he has a bad rep because they blame him for anything that can go wrong. Charlie’s friend Jeffrey is also Vietnamese and his family experiences racism due to the war in Vietnam. Both of them are shunted outside Corrigan’s “high society” and blame is pinned on them when it’s not deserved. They become the town scapegoats.

To me it’s interesting to see the way that people deal with issues that are present in our society in the United States. We see through this small window into what life’s like in rural Australia during a war. It’s definitely an interesting read, and it really keeps you on the edge of your seat, and the characters are real and easy to identify with. It’s a book that sticks with you for a while.

At this point I’m still reading the Book Thief, and things just keep getting tougher. The war is constantly escalating, and Death is starting to complain about the amount of souls that he has to carry into the afterlife. Life at Liesel’s house also changed drastically. An old favor that her father, Hans, owed from WWI when he was a soldier, came into play. What it basically came down to, was that during WWI Hans was saved by his friend, Erik Vanderburg, and because of this, the favor came into play. His friend didn’t survive, but he was survived by his son, Max. I guess that an important thing to add would be that the Vandenburgs are a Jewish family. In order to pay back his friend who is now long gone, the Hubermanns took in Max. The rest of Max’s family was long gone, either dead or disappeared into parts unknown.  

From the book, we learn early on that Hans Hubermann is a man with a big heart, and always willing to help others instead of himself. But what sure prized me the most was his wife’s reaction to basically rising their lives to hide a Jew. In case I haven’t described Rosa Hubermann, here it is. She’s an extremely harsh woman, and berates Liesel and her husband whenever she can, or feels like it. She’s also a very practical woman, and she’s always unfazed and prepared for the worst.

As soon as Max comes into their lives, most of that changes. Rosa doesn’t continue with her constant anger that’s usually aimed at her husband and foster daughter. She makes sure that Max is as comfortable as he can be living in the freezing basement of the Hubermann’s house. He has to stay in the basement during the day so that no passerby would be able to see him through the windows of the house, and at night he would come up the stairs, and try to warm his frozen bones by the fire.

I find this sudden change in Rosa amazing. At the start she’s a woman that loves, but doesn’t show it. As Max comes into their lives, a tenderness emerges that we never even knew was there. To be honest, for the first few chapters in which kind Rosa resided I was a bit confused as to where the real Rosa Hubermann went. But then it hit me how kind of awesome, but at the same time sad the transformation was. It was amazing because once this stranger entered their lives, Rosa became a new person, yet at the same time it was sad, because it was this stranger that made this change that neither Liesel or Hans could've made in Rosa. She completely changed who she was for a boy who she had never met before. But perhaps part of that care that she gave him came from the fact that he needed her to live. Liesel and Hans were capable of going off on their own, and her not needing to worry about them too much. Maybe part of the reason that she berates Hans and Liesel is that deep down she really cares for them, but doesn’t know how to show it. She’s definitely a more complex character than she seems.

Blog Entry #2

At this point, I’m still reading The Book Thief, and the plot keeps getting thicker. Right now, Liesel is still in school, and her reading is continually getting better and stronger. A chapter or two before where I am, the Nazi party had a book burning ceremony to destroy all of the books that could be harmful to party ideals. On this list were books any written by Jewish authors or that featured a Jewish protagonist, or anything that portrayed Jews in a positive light. They were all piled, one on top of the other, forming a funeral pile of potential classics. And of course, Death is present there, at this pseudo-funeral, overseeing the goings-on.

All of the children are required to attend, on account of them being Hitler Youth, and these book burnings were the party’s way of “educating” both the young and the old on what should be kept as far as possible from your intellect. The entire town of Molching is there. Liesel is among them, and to her, seeing a pile of books the size of a small building that are destined for burning, is incomprehensible (it is to me too). So she stands there, watching the books go up in flames while listening to some big shot party leader ramble on about how this burning is for the good of all, and it’s all because the Fuhrer “cares about his people”.

After the burning when nearly all is reduced to ashes, Liesel finds her (adopted) father, Hans, but he’s distracted talking to someone. She ambles over the pile of still hot ashes that some workmen began to clean up. The gray cobblestone of the square where the burning occurred was visible, and on top of that lay three books, nearly unharmed. Feeling brave, Liesel runs to the piles and snags one of the books. After that, she runs back to her father, feeling terrified and exhilarated at the same time, and while walking home, the narrator says that she tucked the book into her jacket, hidden from her father’s eyes. But the entire time while she walked, she felt the book “burning” her, and with each passing second, it got hotter until it hurt her skin.

At first I thought that okay, the book is still hot from the fire – that’s normal. But as it started getting hotter, and I got a little confused. The book should be cooling down, right? I guess not. But think that I was looking at it from too much a common-sensical perspective. Now I think that the book burning Liesel’s skin was her own reaction to stealing it. She felt guilty, both about stealing the book and hiding it from her father, who was her greatest comfort and friend. She also must obviously feel terrified, since she just stole a banned book that was meant to have another fate. On top of that, she knew that someone had seen her take the book. The person who saw her take it was a quiet woman, who was always lost in her mind – she was never fully in reality. All of these emotions were boiling inside Liesel, and that heat transferred to her book, making her feel like she was about to burn to death.

The Book Thief Post #1

Aleks Czmut

So the book that I’ve been reading for the past few weeks is The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. The story follows a young girl named Liesel, in pre-World War II Germany, and then all throughout the war. What I find most interesting about this book is it’s narrator. It’s Death. The Grim Reaper himself narrates the book. First off, I want to say that that’s an interesting choice of narrator, but it fits, seeing the time of history that it it’s set in. Death narrating the story makes it seem very realistic, and gives a perspective that’s omnipresent and helps us to know, in a nutshell, that we can’t escape Death. Another thing that Death employs in his (its?) narration is that the entire time, death uses colors to describe the mood of the scene. For example, when Liesel’s brother dies, the colors that are present in the scene are red, white and black. Through Death’s eyes, the red is the blood on Liesel’s hands after she tears them on the snow (the white) in front of her brother’s grave. The black is represented by the first book the book thief steals: a black cover bound gravedigger’s handbook. In my interpretation, the red is a symbol of the love that Liesel had for her brother, the white is the innocence that she had, symbolized by the snow, which eventually melts and is lost. The black to me is the imminent shadow of Death, who always seems to be following Liesel. The colors also foreshadow the colors of the Nazi party, which although it exists, is not in supreme power yet.

I find it interesting how much of death’s narration includes colors. Perhaps it’s because he has such a harsh duty, that colors are his way of distraction. For example, whenever he begins to talk about Liesel, one of the first things he’ll describe is the color of the sky, or of her coat or someone’s hair. With that being said, I feel that in a scene, death usually describes one color, leaving the rest of the scene monochrome black and white. I like this kind of color scheme, because I feel like it describes the times well, that although the is shadow in our lives, there’s always a bit of bright to contradict it. I think that at a time like that when war is the shadow looming over Liesel’s life, its important for her to find little lights in her life, and for her, her lights are the books that she steals.

But the thing that I find interesting about Liesel and her book thieving is that she doesn’t know how to read very well, yet she’s determined to learn how to. I like how determined she is to learn how to read, and she has the means and resources to do so.