The Thief Lord
by Cornelia Funke, Oliver Latsch
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cornelia Funke, Oliver LatschEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-10-01
ISBN: 043942089X
Number of pages: 376
Publisher: The Chicken House
Book Reviews of The Thief Lord
Book Review: There are spoilers here-- in this review of a novel that gets unspeakably badly and ruinously spoiled at the end
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Thief Lord" deserves 10 stars-- or 0. As you read the first 39 chapters, 3/4 of the book, you are drawn into the trance of a masterpiece. As you read the last 14 chapters, you wonder in disbelief at how the storytelling has collapsed into such drivel and trivia and meaninglessness.
I am rating it (arbitrarily) on the basis of the first 39 chapters.
In the first 39 chapters you have painstaking detail, nitty-gritty realism, emotional detail and subtlety and depth of relations, a painstakingly slow and careful and detailed development and pace of the characters and their evolving interrelationships.
In the last 14 chapters you have reckless careless and slovenly breakneck speed, no interest in the evocation of detail, no interest in subtlety, no interest in the painstakingly detailed development of the characters and their interrelations, and so you feel stunned, that you have been duped, and should never have begun the narrative -- better never to have started it than to have drawn into the entrancement of superreal reality and superreal characters and their relations, and then to be dumbfounded to have it all carelessly abandoned to fall apart.
If books do have magic, if books do have power, then they also alas have the magical power to lure you into them utterly and then to break their spell in ruinous disappointment. I have never been more disappointed, felt more betrayed, because, after having never felt a deeper conviction - since I was already a whole three-quarters of the way through - that I could unreservedly trust the author's power in guiding a masterpiece, could submit to it, could submit to the hypnotic spell, only after all this was every ounce and shred of it shattered into pieces.
Funke should rewrite the ending. The crude literalist "magic" should be left out. The painstakingly slow pace and hypnotically powerful subtlety and painstaking evolution of the characterizations and human relationships and story should then continue in the same course as of the first 39 chapters-- that is, the genuine magic should toss into the dumpster the cheap literal magic tricks so as to let the genuine masterpiece resume.
It's as if two people wrote the story. First a master storyteller and then handed over to a hamfisted amateur tenth-rate joker to finish.
The author is capable of writing a masterpiece, and by chapter 39 you had a sense of how she would proceed with her imaginative hypnosis, and just waited, utterly impressed, waiting for further entrancement, to watch it unfold. The author should continue to keep it realistic the entire way. We would watch Scipio and the rest of the gang (such as Riccio) become slowly reconciled -- perhaps one by one, perhaps some slowly and some quickly, in different ways, all movingly. We would watch Victor and Ida become more and more attached, and perhaps even fall in love-- that's where it seemed to be proceeding, as Victor couldn't drag himself away from the house and Ida seemed to want to keep him there with her -- and get married, and take care of the kids who would move into Ida's house with them as a new family. Bo would free himself of his aunt, but without the coarseness and melodrama and overacting and farce that is part of the general decimation of the entire last 20% of the book. The corrupt businessman Barbarossa and the cruel aunt Esther and uncle Max Hartlieb would have wholly dropped out the story into the narrative oblivion to which they were already on their way. And Scipio, whether or not he ever reached some kind of reconciliation with his father (probably not), would have found catharsis and relief in the acceptance of him in Ida's and Victor's new "family" -- the "parents," Ida and Victor, and their five "children," of whom Scipio would be eventually welcomed an "honorary sixth", even though he may have had his home and terrible father always to have to go back to. But he could find relief and redemption from it in the new home.
I am not a storyteller, and it certainly wouldn't have gone exactly like this, and perhaps there would (and even should) have still been huge surprises -- surely there were already enough of them -- but the twists and surprises would have been done with the same painstakingly slow and realistic integrity of detail and development as before, in which the slightest exchanges of words would be invested with the same deep and genuinely magical significance -- from all that slow attention to detail which drew the reader into the spell of the first 39 chapters in the first place. And even if the story were to continue something like this, since I am not an artist I cannot convey the magic of the storytelling, the magic of it happening. But this is basically how it could have continued and concluded, even with all the further twists and surprises. Without any sentimentality in this, but with the author's continued genuine magic, deftness, painstakingly slowly drawn and evocatively detailed realism.
This, rather than the crude literal magic, trivial retention of the corrupt businessman and Aunt and Uncle, the sudden conflation of realism and easy cheap crude magic that has no basis in the story and brings with such profound disappointment the roof -- of what could have been a masterpiece -- crashing and splintering and thudding down around our ears and we feel devastated in the drivel of the rubble and the waste. Again, if books have good genuine figurative magic to spellbind, the magician also can lose or willfully throw to the dogs her own powers and let everything fall apart-- so much you wish you'd never begun and become entranced by the tale in the first place. I have to say that I have never felt so betrayed by a book, and, as part of this betrayal, had never thought it possible to be disappointed so badly by a book-- for the quality to go from so high to so low, and for it to happen so late in a book and after so much power and trust had been built up only to get so farcically and rudely wiped out.
Summary of The Thief Lord
The sensational, highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller--now available in paperback!
Prosper and Bo are orphans on the run from their cruel aunt and uncle. The brothers decide to hide out in Venice, where they meet a mysterious character who calls himself the "Thief Lord." Brilliant and charismatic, the Thief Lord leads a ring of street children who dabble in petty crimes. Prosper and Bo relish being part of this colorful new family. But the Thief Lord has secrets of his own. And soon the boys are thrust into circumstances that will lead them, and readers, to a fantastic, spellbinding conclusion.
Prosper and Bo are orphans on the run from their cruel aunt and uncle. The brothers decide to hide out in Venice, where they meet a mysterious character who calls himself the "Thief Lord." Brilliant and charismatic, the Thief Lord leads a ring of street children who dabble in petty crimes. Prosper and Bo relish being part of this colorful new family. But the Thief Lord has secrets of his own. And soon the boys are thrust into circumstances that will lead them, and readers, to a fantastic, spellbinding conclusion.
Imagine a Dickens story with a Venetian setting, and you'll have a good sense of Cornelia Funke's prizewinning novel The Thief Lord, first published in Germany in 2000. This suspenseful tale begins in a detective's office in Venice, as the entirely unpleasant Hartliebs request Victor Getz's services to search for two boys, Prosper and Bo, the sons of Esther Hartlieb's recently deceased sister. Twelve-year-old Prosper and 5-year-old Bo ran away when their aunt decided she wanted to adopt Bo, but not his brother. Refusing to split up, they escaped to Venice, a city their mother had always described reverently, in great detail. Right away they hook up with a long-haired runaway named Hornet and various other ruffians who hole up in an abandoned movie theater and worship the elusive Thief Lord, a young boy named Scipio who steals jewels from fancy Venetian homes so his new friends can get the warm clothes they need. Of course, the plot thickens when the owner of the pawn shop asks if the Thief Lord will carry out a special mission for a wealthy client: to steal a broken wooden wing that is the key to completing an age-old, magical merry-go-round. This winning cast of characters--especially the softhearted detective with his two pet turtles--will win the hearts of readers young and old, and the adventures are as labyrinthine and magical as the streets of Venice itself. (Ages 9 and older) --Karin Snelson
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