250 pages or less
Worthwhile reads to fit busy student schedules

-- Kristin Johnson, Literary Critic

Find out why The Reader will have you turning pages
Fiction
The Reader By: Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown Janeway (Translator)
Publisher: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 218 pages, paperback $11, February 1999. Hardcover published 1995.
First Thoughts: A post-war novel that breezes us into the lives of two unlikely lovers. They share a bind that is never broken and show us that some shame is never lifted.

Have you ever felt so ashamed of something that you would endure almost anything to keep it hidden? The shame this novel explores goes beyond the post-Holocaust German guilt that, to this day, plagues the participants and descendents of Nazi Germany. The shame explored in this novel follows one woman throughout her life and shows what lengths she will go to in order to keep her secret hidden.

The Reader tells the story of Michael Berg, a 15-year-old boy struck ill with hepatitis, and Hanna Schmitz, a woman 20 years his senior, who changes the course of his life forever. The two begin an amorous relationship that spans time, as well as a plethora of books. When their affair begins, Michael reads classic novels aloud to Hanna to help him catch up on schoolwork after his extended absence from school due to hepatitis. At times, he senses something unusual about Hanna, but he dismisses the feeling in order to continue the affair. Then one day, Hanna disappears without a word.

Some years later, Michael is a law student observing a war crimes trial. To his surprise he finds that it is his ex-lover, Hanna, who is on trial. When Hanna is convicted, Michael decides to pursue a long-distance relationship with her until a fateful day arrives, at which point we reach the climax of the story.

The backdrop for this novel is, by nature, interesting: post-war Germany festering with the aftereffects of the Nazi regime. Schlink uses an economic style of prose that is refreshing, yet visual and grounded in details. But most compelling about The Reader is the way Schlink’s no-nonsense prose gives the story a “just the facts” kind of sensation. The combination of facts and directness held me tight in the grasp of the storyteller.

The author also takes aim at post-World War II German guilt by identifying readings and searching them for meaning. He pinpoints the general feeling after the war as numbness. This placement of feeling seems to make some sense of the senseless tragedy of the Holocaust. He writes, “All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life’s functions are reduced to a minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurrences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators, too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenery, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk.”

The Reader was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, A Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and an international bestseller. Born in 1944, Schlink himself is a descendent of the Nazi regime, a judge and author of several crime novels. He resides in Berlin and Bonn, Germany.

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