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Summary: Great book!
Review: This was a great book! It has many themes compiled together in it: love, lust, hate, betrayal, compassion, and friendship. At times, the book seems to turn the unexpected direction, which makes it interesting to follow. Great mixture of imagery and literary techniques.
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Summary: The inexplicable is difficult to explain
Review: Schlink has attempted to lead himself, his fellow German generation and all his readers towards some kind of understanding of his nations past, the Holocaust and essentially incomprehensible questions. How can one generation love and judge its parents, whether as the offspring of Nazis or non-German racists? I think the large number of negative responses to the work expressed by the reviews above actually reveal the success of the author rather than failure. Schlink has disturbed his "readers" into thinking and responding.Like all provocative writing this work contains layers of perception and interpretation that depend upon the imaginative perseverance and open mindedness of the reader.Schlink asks paradoxical seemingly senseless yet nontheless real questions. Can we love what or who we hate ?,can we forgive what or who we hate?
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Summary: Thoughts on The Reader
Review: Whenever I spot a book, movie, article on WWII it's a must read for me. This story shows how two people are drawn together for very simple reasons during a very hard time in postwar Germany. I truly loved it.
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Summary: only read half
Review: The first half was so so, the second have was a sleeping pill !
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Summary: why the fuss?
Review: I read this book in German, because I saw it had made the British bestseller lists, and I know that German books almsot never get that far. Why? Because the are almost all devoid of any emotional colour; stripped bare, pared down, austere. This is so typical of almost every book by a German author I can really say it's a characteristic. Funny thing is, this characteristic in this case became a virtue - see one of the official reviews above. Could it be that the writer just wasn't CAPABLE of fleshing out the story? All we have is a skeleton - I expect more from a novel. What I do know is that this author made a point of getting an English translation, even paying for it himself BEFORE the German came out, and so managed to get a bit of early attention outside Germany. Within Germany it's so typical of many other books it would never stand out. The book only become popular here AFTER its success in English. OK, so there's a ghost of a plot, which could have been made into a gripping novel, but the characters are cardboard thin and I don't care about a single one of them. Another case of hype.
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: I read this book mainly because for my english class, we had to pick a book about an author who was not from the United States. But once i started it, i was not sure how i has exactly supposed to write a report on it. For those of you who have read the book, you know what I mean. I had no idea that the book would turn into what it is. The person reading the book is provided with minimal information at the start of the book, and that makes you want to turn the pages. then, once it actually goes to the storyline, the book is a very thought provoking read. What a fantastic book.
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Summary: Reading in the dark
Review: The story of Michael Berg and Hanna has great potential but Schlink failed to explore the emotive value of each character. I empathized with Hanna's naivete and illiteracy. Yet, it seems that her character was mystified to the point of a non-entity. When Hanna asks the judge "what would you have done?", Schlink fails to embrace this theme and give it substance. Throughout the book there is a sense of incongruency and lack of flow.
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Summary: Ausgezeichnet auf Deutsch!
Review: Der Roman "der Vorleser " von Bernhard Schlink ist einfach Super! I absolutely loved Schlink's novel "The Reader"... I had picked up the German Edition of this novel in Germany this summer, and finally got around to reading it. I couldn't put it down and read it in four hours. I haven't read the English translation, so I cannot judge the version that others have written reviews about on this site, but the German novel is the best thing I have read since Patrick Suskind's "The Perfume" a few years ago. It is extremely thought provoking and makes one seriously think about love, relationships, guilt, responsibility,shame etc.
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Summary: BORING, BORING, BORING
Review: I hate it when I waste my money on a book that I can't even finish because it is so bad.
Rating:
Summary: Schlink disappoints his Reader
Review: I did not care for this book in the least. First off, I felt that it read at a High School level and was in no way interesting to the adult reader. Schlink begins The Reader in mid-story. We have no background or character development. One day Michael Berg, the main character, is sick in bed and the next he is having sex with a woman twice his age. Then we turn the page and she is a Nazi war criminal. As Schlink takes us down this some what interesring story line he still forgets to develop the characters. Why should we care what happens to Hanna? Schlink did not reach me on a moral or philosophical level, he could not even reach me on an erotic level. All in all, this Reader was a let down and I would not recommend it to anyone.
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