Product Description

For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems. 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 is a criminal. Much about her behaviour during the trial does not make 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. 'A tender, horrifying novel that shows blazingly well how the Holocaust should be dealt with in fiction. A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience' INDEPENDENT SATURDAY MAGAZINE

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2212 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 post-war 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 post-war generations, between the guilty and the innocent and between words and silence. --R Ellis, Amazon.com

Review
This novel has become famous as one of the most piercingly intelligent examinations of the dark cloud which still hangs over Germany - the cloud of guilt for the Holocaust, felt sometimes unconsciously by a generation whose parents or grandparents were, however indirectly, involved. After the Second World War, Michael, a German schoolboy, gets to know a woman bus conductor who seduces him and leads him into a world of joyous sensuality shadowed only by the uncertainty of her temper. She encourages him to read to her - and it is only when he realizes that she is illiterate that their relationship becomes a little clearer, but not more stable. They lose touch with each other, and when, as a university student, he attends a war crimes tribunal, he sees her in the dock. The story is almost simplistic, the narrative as clear and unsentimental as the style. The reader is drawn into the story slowly but powerfully, empathizing strongly with the narrator, Michael. The way in which he feels his way towards forgiveness not only for his former mistress, but for himself, is the kernel of an extraordinary book which weds philosophy and narrative seamlessly, clearly illuminating the tangled motives which lie behind our ignorance and our censure. (Kirkus UK)

A compact portrayal of a teenaged German boy's love affair with an emotionally remote older woman, and the troubled consequence of his discovery of who she really is and why she simultaneously needed him and rejected him. Seven years after their intimacy, university student Michael Berg accidentally learns that (now) 40ish Hannah Schmitz had concealed from him a past that reaches back to Auschwitz and had burdened her with nightmares from which her young lover was powerless to awaken her. Toward its climax, the novel becomes, fitfully, frustratingly abstract, but on balance this is a gripping psychological study that moves skillfully toward its surprising and moving conclusion. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems. 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 is a criminal. Much about her behaviour during the trial does not make 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. 'A tender, horrifying novel that shows blazingly well how the Holocaust should be dealt with in fiction. A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience' INDEPENDENT SATURDAY MAGAZINE

Customer Reviews

One of the best books ever
A beautiful book. Quietly, unassumingly, it nudges and insinuates itself into your heart. Explores the grey areas of morality and the spectra of human psyches with incredible sophistication. Is a rare example of a novel that feels whole, and doesn't sag towards the end.

Maybe something got lost in translation
When Michael was fifteen, he began an affair with a middle-aged woman named Hanna. They shared little beyond the physical relationship; she was not a talker or a thinker as he was, but she did seem to enjoy it when he read to her. One day she disappeared without a word, only to surface years later when she was on trial for crimes against humanity.

The writing style of this book is similar to Albert Camus' "The Stranger," where the main character narrates the events of his life without passion or sympathy, in a dulled, distant, vacant voice. The first half of the book is fairly interesting with his steamy but unemotional affair with this mysterious and strangely callous woman. I had to force myself to finish the second half, though, which explains her disappearance, trial, and the next eighteen years, because the monotone narration got really old and boring.

It felt like the author was trying to be shocking and profound with his detached storytelling, but I was not impressed. This would have made a very interesting short story, but I found it a tedious book.

The Reader
The Reader is a subtle, thought-provoking work that continues - but does not quite belong to - a tradition of Holocaust literature. The novel very cleverly raises questions about the nature of complicity and the boundaries of responsibility. It also examines the idea of collective 'amnesia' and its consquential twin, collective guilt. It achieves this through a deceptively simple narrative that enables a degree of analysis and discourse without the author having to overtly theorise. The narrative carries both a metaphorical and emotional weight that is quietly devestating without having to depict the horrors of the concentration camps in explicit detail.

The writing, economic and sometimes a little stark, can be read as a little cold, dispassionate. But more often it is devestatingly precise. However, there are moments when the language gets a little glitchy, and you suspect something has been lost in the translation. Overall though, the novel is both intensely sad and mentally stimulating, sustenance for the heart and the head. A modern classic.