The Reader

Rating:
Summary: Heartbreakingly Poignant
Review: For a long time I dismissed this book from my reading list because several friends kept telling me how very bad it was. Recently, however, I've developed a renewed interest in both Holocaust literature and literature related to the Holocaust, i.e., literature revolving around those not directly involved with the atrocities. THE READER was one of the books I decided to pursue and I'm certainly glad I did.

When I began THE READER the first thing I noticed was its formal and elegant style. Unlike some of the reviewers, I didn't have any problems witht the translation and my German is perfect. I found the language employed in THE READER to be lyrical, poetic and meditative. I was as entranced by the beauty of the words as I was by the book's harrowing story.

I've read a lot of criticism about this book's storyline but I thought it was just beautiful. At first, I found it a little difficult to believe in a love affair between a fifteen year old boy and a thrity-six year old woman, but as the story progressed, the love between this very unlikely couple became more and more believable. The ending of the book was, for me, simply heartbreaking.

If I have any criticism of this book, it's the fact that Schlink telegraphs Hanna's "secret" far too early. As soon as she "lost" the note Michael left her, I knew why she was acting the way she was. This criticism, however, is nothing more than a quibble and I don't think the "early" knowledge of Hanna's secret detracts in any way from the book's story.

THE READER is a book that had a tremendous impact on me. It's lyrical, poetic, harrowing and tragic. In my opinion, it's a true masterpiece that deserves all the praise heaped on it and then some.

Rating:
Summary: Right of survivorship
Review: Hepatitis made him weak. He was fifteen years old. Michael Berg, the narrator, knew every building, every garden, every fence on his way to school. Being ill is an enchanting interlude. The fever sharpens the imagination. He encounters Hanna and vists her frequently.

His last years of school and first years of university were happy. Parents had played a variety of roles in the Third Reich. Everyone condemned parents to a sentence of shame. Michael enrolls in a seminar on the camps. The group attends a trial. Hanna Schmitz, one of the defendants, had been Michael's friend. She had served at Auschwitz until early in 1944.

Hanna makes a bad impression on the court. Michael comes to realize that she cannot read or write. She refused promotions in her industrial job. She sought out the job with the SS as a guard. She describes the confusion on the march westward from the camps and receives a life sentence.

The narrator tries to speak to his father. In those years there was little direct observation that made life in those camps real. The few images available were derived from Allied photographs.

The student movement was a generational conflict. Coming to terms with the Nazi past was one of the issues of contention inalterably. For the narrator's generation, collective guilt was a lived reality. Legal history was to be his metier. History involves building bridges between the past and the present. He worked on legal codes and drafts of the enlightenment. The codes were based upon the belief that order was intrinsic to the world.

The narrator sends Hanna tapes of his reading, the Odyssey, Chekhov, Kafka. In the fourth year he receives a note from Hanna. The note is child-like. It provides verification of his theory that she could not read or write in the past. I will not disclose further details of the plot or the ending of this fine work.

Rating:
Summary: The hype was focused on the wrong thing
Review: This book received a lot of flak. And, personally, I think people were fussing about the wrong things altogether. Get over the sexual relationship between a 15 year old boy and a woman. Get over it. Because, if you can't... then you're going to miss the point of the book. This book ISN'T a wild discussion of sexual liasions between a young man and an older woman. There is little discussion about that. That is only the set-up, the window in which we can look at the female character from a safe distance and try to understand her.

The themes of the book are so far beyond this trivial sexual relationship that everyone raised such a stink about... This is thought-provoking, unsettling, interesting, well thought-out, and engaging. To NOT read this book would be to pass up on a chance to broaden yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Other Reviews Don't Begoin to Appreciate this book at all.
Review: Having been fascinated with modern Germany throughout my life, this book literally left me in tears. Most reviews see the book on a surface level. That of a story of a young German in the late 1950's falling in love with a beautiful, older blonde, 36 year old Hanna, whom in Part 2 of the book we find out shockingly was a 21 year old SS Guard during the last two years of WWII.

Not knowing what you now know above, but being very sensitive myself to modern Germany, and the feeling of modern Germany and its contrast with the older Nazi period and the feelings that entailed, I became aware that "Hanna" was more than the "girlfriend" of young Michael Berg in the book, she was an allegory for the feelings many many Germans felt for the period itself. The deep love affair that Germany had with Nazism and the ultimate realisation of the newer generation of what happened in the past is mirrored in the book.

The book stands as it is. Although non fiction it states the case "as is". To me it is clearly anti-Nazi, although that does not mean that it does not appreciate the affair that Germans have and had with their national psyche and their past.

The first clue that the author gives us that Hanna does represent the "old" Germany is the description of the apartment block she lives in. Then the way she seduces him...(just the way many Germans perceive that the "movement" grabbed Germany itself) and the ending and her sudden disappearance (just like the Nazi regime came to a sudden end).

This book is about the deep murmurings of the German soul. And its search for forgiveness, for answers, and the suicide of Hanna and the small donation she left behind signifying the sorry state that represents the resolution of the problem for Germany in the years since the war.

Namely that the war does and will continue to knaw at the German soul. That it is impossible to really reconcile what happened. That, as Schlink so clearly states that films like Schindlers List drive open the reality of what happened in a way that even many people involved could not appreciate at the time, and it makes salient points about the feelings, repressed and otherwise that Germany and Germans carry with them to this day.

Had Germany won the war, an ex SS man noted on a documentary I was watching the other day, no one would have been writing all this up as so terrible - just the price of war on the eastern front. After all, it is the victor who usually gets to write the history of the event.

And in all this lies the brilliance of the book. On the one hand it extends out the hand of understanding and sympathy (not forgiveness) to a people, regime and phenomenon of a time corrupted by a force of evil that and who's consequences were so terrible that they continue to invade and pervade the nation of Germany to this very day.

In a sense the reality of the limited atonement and bewilderment of a nation defeated and shamed but once proud and in a sense still proud feels. The juxtaposition might lead one to see the book as having Nazi sympathies, but I think not. It is rather a presentation of the facts

An affair of an entire nation with a movement that existed and a time that came and went with a generation that has for the most part now died but whom in the 1950's were still very much part of German life.

At the end of the book Mark arranges a holiday to go off with Hanna again, but she commits suicide just before her release from prison. This is after she has read, understood and atoned.

This to me signifies closure and the death of the movement. Its about moving on. And yet the reality of the book conveys that there can be no simple closure and that some things are always there....

Rating:
Summary: leaves you with more questions than answers
Review: This is an easy read, I picked it up because I needed something easy to read after taking a lot of hard college courses. It moves very fast, and there's a big twist. A typical Oprah book.

Rating:
Summary: Kinda weird...
Review: This book was ok, but left me thinking it was kind of gross and weird. The ending was a nice little twist, and it was a quick easy read, but not the greatest thing I've picked up. I didn't really like or connect with the main characters and couldn't understand the appeal of the relationship between the two. If you have nothing better read, go for it, otherwise pass on it.

Rating:
Summary: A must!
Review: I've read this book in Polish so literary values of the English translations are not the point of my reflexion.
I just wanted to say - this book will make yours eyes sweat...
It never happened to me while reading. I just could not stop crying.
No great classical novels have ever made me feel this way. This modest book appears in an era when writing a GREAT novel is wirtually impossible. We all know why, and we all agree. Of course - great novels can appear in the context of postmodern American Literature, but they don't necessarily make a great read.
Schlink does it with his modesty and understatement.
And one more thing: THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT HOLOCAUST. The author had chosen the Poles to be the victims in this book - please respect it. 3.000.000 Poles (besides another 3.000.000 Jewish citizens of Poland) died from German atrocities during WWII - and when one uses the word Holocaust it denies them the right to memory.

Rating:
Summary: a novel for us to think about past history event!
Review: I needed to read this book for my summer reading when I was in high school. When I start reading, I felt it's a easy book to read, the English was not hard at all. But the first few chapters are definitely weired because an 15 year old boy have sex with an old woman. In some way I think it's really sick! But once you get over that chapters, the novels starts getting your attenton. The old woman just left boy without saying anything, and when the boy next time see her is in the court. At that point, you will start wondering what happened to this old woman. Of course there are a lot stuff need to do with this woman's background. She was a Nazi and killed people. She feels guilty! This novel has something to do with human's guilt and also people cares how other pepople in the society look at them. Once you start understaind all these points, you will think it's a pretty sad novel. In some way I think the way author represent this book is quite unique, you won't feel you are reading a text or history event books. It's worth reading it!

Rating:
Summary: What happens when memories intersect with reality.
Review: I picked this book up without knowing much about it, and read it on an airplane. It would be remarkable if it was a true story, but as a fictional novel one has to wonder about the motivation. That said, the story itself starts slowly and is perhaps overly done in regards to the sexual relationship between a young man and a much older woman. On a couple of occasions I just about put the book down in the first third as the story was choppy and seemed to be a sensationalized fantasy of a male teen-ager, but was glad I didn't drop the story there.

The emotion evoked in the last several chapters is so vivid one can feel it long after the book is over. The sense of loss, the emptiness of change and the confusion between morality and personal attachment is explored quite deeply. I think that perhaps what makes the story compelling, and sometimes a bit frustrating, is the perspective of the main character. We are let in as if it is being told in the first person, but either the central character is a person who has difficulty accepting and processing reality, or the audience is only let in so far.

In the end, this is a story about expectations, and the loss that comes with change. It is about the moments in time when reality in the present comes face to face with our memories and our held beliefs about situations and people. The result is always bittersweet and vividly powerful. A good read, and a moving story.

Rating:
Summary: A superb book with a different angle to the holocaust
Review: Being German, I have read many books on the holocaust and WWII. However, no book has moved me as much as this one. Written by a German, this book takes a completely different approach to the topic of the holocaust and the rise of the Nazis, a human approach. It allows the reader to read about this time without feeling intimated or uncomfortable. Schlink broaches the subject in a very unique way, very indirectly, but lets the reader understand the horrors of that period in German history - I was very moved. The story itself is very clever and well written. It's hard to say that one enjoyed reading about such a topic, but it was for me a very refreshing and refined way to look at how this period in German history affected Germans. Not in an in your face way. This is a fine piece of literature.