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Summary: A Review of "The Reader"
Review: "The Reader" was a book that was very difficult to read and more difficult to put down. It was over-whelming to read again of the atrocities that were allowed to occur in Germany during the war, but also it opened up my mind to know those atrocities did happen over and over without people doing anything to stop them. It made me question myself and what I would have done had I lived in that era? I was surprised at the ending, but now feel, it couldn't have ended any other way. I was "in that era" for a very long time after reading the book.
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Summary: They were victims too?
Review: Light reading; attempts to sympathize with unwilling Holocaust perpetrators. The movie industry and news media have not been sympathetic to unwilling German participants, and there must have been many. Heck, I didn't think there were any!The book does capture the narrator's struggle with his own self-imposed standards. He is obsessed with Anna. Admitting that he still has feelings for her would probably bring him to a lower level than his parents who had "tolerated the perpetrators in their midst". If The Reader helps to minimize unjust animosity, then it has done its job.
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Summary: Beautiful
Review: I found this book absolutely beautiful. The story left so much for the imagination. I just found it so romantic in a way, yet sad at the same time. This book changed my way of thinking.
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Summary: Schlink didn't make me think
Review: Amongst many excerpts of reviews that precede the novel is one by heavyweight intellectual supremo George Steiner, who says 'the reviewer's sole and privileged function is to say as loudly as he is able "read this" and read it again"' My sole and privileged function is to say "Don't bother reading it once." Here's the story. The narrator remembers back to when he was 15 and had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, a tram conductress. Lucky boy. But then she disappears. Later he finds out she's on trial for war crimes. She had been a concentration camp guard. She and some other guards had locked 500 prisoners in a church, and didn't let them out when the church caught fire because they couldn't find the key. She gets sent down. Some years later she tops herself in the slammer, although she was due to be released. Was she guilty? I don't care. During their affair, the narrator used to read books to Hanna, and later he finds out that she's illiterate. While she's in the clink, he records books onto audio tape for her, although she's learned to read and write. So what. Maybe the story had potential, but in Schlink's hands it's dull, uninvolving and clumsily written. Perhaps part of the fault for the poor writing style lies with the translator, but she can't be blamed for the lack of characterisation, narrative drive or tension, the dead dialogue, the totally ungripping trial scenes, the tedious sentences and redundant clauses, and the narrator's irritating habit of asking daft rhetorical questions at every opportunity. If the book has any interesting ideas about love, the Holocaust or Germany's guilt, I didn't spot them. On the positive side, it's only 207 pages long and easy to read.
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Summary: I don't get it.
Review: I hated this book. Yah, yah, the prose is good; but the promise on the cover of a "morally devastating novel" is not good. There are two parts to the book. In the first, 15-year-old Michael Berg begins an affair with Hanna, a woman in her mid-thirties. That part of the book is good. The writer seems to capture the logic and emotions of a 15-year-old boy quite realistically. In the second part, Michael is a grown man watching the trial of his former lover. This is the part that really fails. There is no sense that Michael has matured in any way. Also, the final message is not morally devastating nor even believable. I wonder about those who've written that the book made them change the way they look at the Holocaust. What, they never thought that ordinary, mostly decent people participated? They never thought that many of the perpetrators were caught in events from which they saw no escape? For a better discussion of these issues, read Hannah Arendt, not Bernhard Schlink. If the book weren't so hyped, I'd probably give it three stars, but I feel like there needs to be a leavening influence here.
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Summary: Story Divided
Review: The beginning was beautifully written and sensitive. After Hanna leaves, the story goes down such a different path that is so disconnected from the beginning which I call the first story. While I appreciate the message that the second part of the book was sending, it was like reading a book written in two parts by two unequally talented authors.
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Summary: A great short read.
Review: I thought The Reader from Bernard Schlink has a great narrative quality although and as one of the other reviewers mentioned it is not just a story it is a man growing to accept life, love and himself. I thought it was a bit too short and not as in depth as I usually like but all over a great read espeacially if your introducing yourself to Holocast and German Novels.
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Summary: Way too Simplistic
Review: The story never went beyond the surface. It is a quick read but nothing more. There are no moral lessons to learn from this book.
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Summary: not my style
Review: thought i found the prose very beautiful, i found it hard to get through this book. it was tedious and slow.
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Summary: A Smooth Translation
Review: Bernard Schlink & Carol Janeway give us a smooth, poingnant, German translated book of love, eroticism and shocking hideous crime. In "The Reader", I found myself easily drawn into Michael and Hanna's passionate world. We follow their lives from their 1st meeting when Michael is 15 & Hanna is 25. And onto when Michael is a young law student and Hanna is on trial for an unspeakable crime. As in most "Oprah's Picks"....this is a book of hope in it's truist form. A daunting novel for all. if you find my comments interesting, please click the "yes"--thanks--CDS
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