The Reader By Bernard Schlink

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* Publisher: Pantheon Books
* Number Of Pages: 218
* Publication Date: 1997-06
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0679442790
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780679442790
* Binding: Hardcover

Book Description:

Already an acclaimed and best-selling work of fiction in Europe (currently being translated into fourteen different languages worldwide), The Reader is both a literary surprise and a moral challenge: a riveting, provocative, and deeply moving novel about a young boy’s erotic awakening in a passionate, clandestine love affair with an older woman, and what happens to them both when the secrets in her past are revealed.

Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg becomes ill on the way home from school. A woman takes care of him. Later, the boy arrives at her home with a bunch of flowers to thank her. And then comes back again. Hanna is the first woman he has ever desired. But there is something slightly off-key about her. His questions about her family and her life go unanswered. One day Hanna simply disappears. Michael’s life goes on, but he can’t forget her.

Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna.

The woman he had loved so passionately is a criminal. Much about her behavior during the trial makes no sense. But then, suddenly and terribly, it does–Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret.

As the past erupts into the present–both Michael’s past with Hanna, and the past of Germany itself–Michael must accept that he will never be free of either of them.

Amazon.com:

Oprah Book Club® Selection, February 1999: Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany’s Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? “We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable…. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?”

The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review’s Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. What does it mean to love those people–parents, grandparents, even lovers–who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink’s prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue, and excess in any form. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany’s pre- and postwar generations, between the guilty and the innocent, and between words and silence. –R. Ellis

Summary: Will make you think!
Rating: 4

I started reading this book knowing very little about it other than its reviews calling it “beautiful” “disturbing” “morally devastating” and “speaks straight to the heart.” Although perhaps not as disturbing or morally devastating as some reviews claim, I did find the story to be beautiful and one that spoke to my heart. I found myself truly caring about the characters, however bizarre they were (and the strange relationships they were part of).

Anyone interested in post-war Germany and the aftermath of the Holocaust would enjoy this book. I found myself wondering several times whether this was a piece of non-fiction, considering how it certainly reads that way (it IS fiction, however).

The print is fairly large and the pages narrow. I read this book in one day easily. I was drawn into the story easily. The questions of morality, ethics, and philosophy that this book brings up left me thinking long after putting this book down.

Summary: Abuse is not romance
Rating: 3

This book is an oddity. Its international success is a complete surprise to me. The fact that it has provoked over 760 reviews here with a broad and even spectrum of responses demonstrates that it hits a nerve. Many different ones actually.
I like Schlink as a writer of detective novels. He invented a great PI, an aging reformed Nazi called Selb, a name which enabled great titles like Selbs Justiz or Selbs Mord. A writer and a hero with their hearts on the right spot, with interesting cases in post war Germany.
But the Reader is something else. The story is ‘simple’ enough: a teenage boy has a love affair with an older woman, a tram ticket collector; part of the charm of the affair is that the boy reads to the woman after sex. Then they lose contact when she moves away. Later, he is a student at university, he finds out that she is an accused in a Nazi trial, she was a KZ guard, and it becomes apparent that she is illiterate, and too proud to admit it. She can not even read the dossier of the prosecution.
Which reminds me of Monty Python’s Meaning of Life: the fish in the aquarium in the restaurant watch the guests eating fish and ask themselves in excitement: what does it mean? Exactly. What is Schlink’s point? Till now I have no clue.
Are the Nazi criminals just illiterates too proud to admit their lack of education? That can’t be it, obviously, so what is ‘it’?
Schlink pokes into a deep well of ambiguity, but there ends his contribution. He goes no further in clarifying anything. What do we conclude from his story? I wish I knew.

Summary: Guilty
Rating: 5

Although highly recommended it took me a while to finally read this book. The story seemed too hard to me, but anyway I read it.
It is a very compelling book . The style is clean and direct without, apparently, any concesion to warmth. But at the end just as Hanna accepts her culpability the reader understands the feelings hidden in the remembrances of Michael.
Hanna as a character is not specially sympathetic but the diference is that we can see her as a a human being while for her the prisioners were nothing. Maybe the book is so attractive because we can develope that humanity to someone who did inhuman things.

Summary: Sex, Obsession, Death
Rating: 5

After reading the Los Angeles Times’ cover note that The Reader is a “disturbing and finally morally devastating novel,” I postponed reading it till I thought I could handle ‘moral devastation.’ I have to say that was quite an overstatement, in my opinion: part of the self-righteousness that appears in the trial in the latter half of the book.

Bernard Schlink created a delightful afternoon read that included erotic interludes reminiscent of The Graduate (1967 Film), intellectual and moral arguments and a decision on the best way to honor someone you love in difficult circumstances.

A bit of an insider’s view (Nazi’s) of the holocaust toys with conventional horror at what was perpetrated. Were guards in fear for their lives if they did not cooperate fully?

Far from theoretical analysis, Schlink forces us to new analyses by asking, “What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?”

Showing a keen understanding of humanity, Schlink writes, “Even when the facts took our breath away, we held them up triumphantly. Look at this!” (That could account for part of the passion surrounding Schindler’s List (Widescreen Edition).)

Are we all doomed to punish ourselves if society doesn’t punish us enough? Or to punish ourselves for the crimes society does not even hold against us?

If you want a fun book, this will do it. If you want a book that will haunt you for months or even years, this will do it. If you want a book with characters and actions about which you can argue and philosophize way into the night, this one will do that, too!

Summary: Flawless!!
Rating: 5

I read this book years ago . Five stars are not enough for this well written, engaging story that stays with the reader for years & years. In many ways, this is a morality tale; however, it is also so much more. Schlink provides a thought-provoking evocation of one of history’s darkest times. Everyone I’ve given to this has had only positive things to say. Recommended without hesitation!!

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