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“It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.”
Author Markus Zusak
Author Markus Zusak
Markus Zusak is the author of five books, including the international bestseller, The Book Thief , which spent more than a decade on the New York Times bestseller list, and is translated into more than forty languages – establishing Zusak as one of the most successful authors to come out of Australia.
Fighting Ruben Wolfe is a young adult fiction by Markus Zusak. Phrased in the unique and informal dialect of rural Australia, it is told from the perspective of Cameron Wolfe, the brother of a temperamental amateur boxer. The Cameron brothers are ashamed of their family’s poverty, and decide to take up fighting to prove themselves. In the process, they learn that the cathartic physical feat of combat not only releases energy, it earns them self-worth. It also brings out a unique emotional life in each of them, as they use their bodies to unconsciously respond to internal and external conflict. By the end of the novel, they engage each other in combat, learning that though fighting can stimulate the expression of repressed emotions, it is wisest to be selective about which fights to pick, as undiscriminating combat can emotionally harm an instigator as well as his opponent. .... more
“Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?”
...........The print in the novel changes to cursive writing for these private male conversations and marks the exclusion of this discourse of sensitivity and caring from their day-to-day encounters. Cameron, who narrates the novel, quotes Ruben: '"If I hear someone sayin anything about her, I'm gonna nail em. I'm gonna kill em'..and sure enough, he nearly does" (Zusak, 2000, p. 21) .........Developing Students' Critical Literacy: Exploring Identify Construction in Young Adult Fiction
“We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it's beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it's shared and taken and fought for.
That's the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out?”
Chapter 2
Chapter 2 - Fighting Ruben Wolfe.mp4Chapter 3
Chapter 4 Audio - Fighting Ruben Wolfe .mp4Chapter 4
Chapter 3 Audio - Fighting Ruben Wolfe .mp4
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