The Reader - Softcover

Schlink, Prof Bernhard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679781307 ISBN 13: 9780679781301

Publisher: Phoenix, 1998

Synopsis

The novel traces the relationship between a German lawyer, Michael, and an older woman Hanna, beginning with their affair when he is fifteen in post-war Germany. It then goes on to desribe his later discovery as a law student attending war crimes trials, that she had been a guard at a camp attatched to Auschwitz - for which she is imprisoned.

About this title

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:

"A formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel." --Los Angeles Times"Moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful. . . . [The Reader] leaps national boundaries and speaks straight to the heart." --The New York Times Book Review"Arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex. . . . Mr. Schlink tells his story with marvelous directness and simplicity." --The New York Times"Haunting. . . . What Schlink does best, what makes this novel most memorable, are the small moments of highly charged eroticism." --Francine Prose, Elle

About this edition

• Publisher: Phoenix
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679781307
• ISBN 13: 9780679781301
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224