my second time reading it, and it was just as powerful as the first time.

truly, this author has a talent for clobering us - the reader - with emotions, and yet it never feels sentimental or over-wrought. and i'm just now realizing that it's probably his deft hand with language that allows this to happen - new words and word combinations that haven't been told/used over and over again and allow the pure thought/motion to escape before we can react with cynicism.

having grown up reading anne frank's diary of a young girl, and seeing WWII as a very unidirectional assault of one country on one people, this book widens the the scope to include the german people as victims of this war as well.

lastly, using 'death' as the omniscient narrator was a brilliant ploy: original in itself, it added an extra reminder of man's self-destruction (showing 'death' collecting soul from russia's deep cold) and allowed for a more current, modern commentary of the story being told.