I really enjoyed this book; it was very well-written, very engaging, and very disturbing.

The main thing I thought about as I read the book was the concept of culpability: to what degree is an individual responsible for the actions of her society? Who is really guilty/evil, and who is really innocent/good? The point of this book is to challenge our assumptions about these concepts, and to undermine what have traditionally been very simplistic, binary ways of thinking about the Holocaust. Perhaps this goal is by itself problematic, but there’s no question that it was achieved very well, in several ways.

The first and most obvious device is that of the narrative voice. The narrator is Death, and Death brings a unique perspective to the story. On the one hand Death is the ultimate neutral party: everyone dies and in that sense everyone is equal. At the same time Death has biases and sympathies - more sympathetic to the victims of the death camps than the German citizens hiding from bombing raids, for example. Death is forthright about spoiling the ending of the book, in fact a bit annoyingly so. Little wonder though - everyone dies and so it’s not the ending that matters to Death, but rather the journey. From this perspective all of the illogical things that the characters do in this story - from sheltering Jews at great personal risk, to providing bread to prisoners on a death march - are in fact quite common-sense, because each of these actions contribute to the humanity of the people involved.

The more clever, and subtle, device is the concept of color and the imagery surrounding it. It is Death who takes particular notice of the color of the sky at the moment of someone’s demise. And it is the human characters who are absorbed in a black-and-white world of dominoes, dice, accordion keys, and of course books. There are only a few human characters (a painter and his daughter, it’s worth noting) who pay very much attention to the color of the sky, and of course, those are the characters who are best at challenging our understanding of good and evil.

And aside from all of the above, there are other layers worth exploring: the ten different books which frame this story, and their curious relationship with death and mortality; the imagery of flight; the large cast of enigmatic supporting characters; the many different kinds of journeys, whether attempted or successful; and on and on. This book is a fascinating story, very well-told and written with a great deal of compassion and humanity.