The Reader

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and intriguing
Review: An interesting and original twist on a worn theme. A unique thought process that delved further than than the "facts", and delt more with happenings and emotions.

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Summary: Fine portrayal of one man's misfortune with a troubled woman
Review: Schlink succeeded in representing an average man's struggle to find love, and the unaverage man's resulting eternal misfortune. Mike Berg fell in love with Hanna Schmitz for obvious reasons at an extreme early age in his life: she pampered him like a helpless child and introduced him to physical love. However, when trying to capture love's essences apart from the physical, Mike soon learned that he was doomed to fail. Hanna, an overly insecure woman who focused only on her well being, became as ruthless as ever through verbal and physical abuse. As Hanna had undoubtedly been overly neglected in something as a child, her resulting actions only hurt her. Hanna had been ultimately charged with a crime committed as a guard in Nazi Germany that sent her to prison. One reading this novel may easily be persuaded, as Mike eventually seemed to be, that her evil actions became justified because of her insecurities. What one must keep in mind is that a lover would do anything to protect himself in a relationship, and believing her actions to be justified is a typical thing men do to reduce their own cognitive dissonance. If we believe Hanna's actions to be justified, we are looking at it subjectively, as Mike, or the author. Understanding Hanna as a self-centered sadist, I believe is the correct way to look at her because there are certainly some essential rights and wrongs in this world that there are no exceptions for. Hanna violated them, and coerced a man to obsess over her through excessive physical attention, mental neglect, abuse and abandonment.

Rating:
Summary: It made me think, and that is worthwhile
Review: I have the sad sneaking suspision that too many people nowadays expect to be entertained by the books they read, rather than feeling unsettled - thoughts come to the surface that were so far unconsidered.

This is exactly what this book did for me. While, for entertainment, I usually enjoy fluffy novels, this one entertained enough to keep my mind sharp, yet provoked me enough with difficult questions to make me recommend it. I agree it is a bit vague in sections, I disagreed with the characters' choices so often I was frustrated - but in Hanna's questions to the judge, I felt the questions we all should be asking ourselves. What would we have done in her situation? It's easy to take the moral highground after the fact, but what of the moment, the pressure?

Spellbinding and thought provoking.

Rating:
Summary: A worthwhile endeavor
Review: The holocaust, as a subject of media attention, has evolved through time and catered to various agendas. The idea that it is 'incomparable', 'incomprehensible', and perhaps, 'unforgivable' places it in a league of its own with respect to being included in a novel. The social responsibility it entails, the expected sensitivity of the audience, the overall risk, the risk of offending the population --all these are considerable. However, The Reader incorporates both the holocaust as a back drop for his novel and impressions of the younger generation faced by its ramifications. The result is a most poignant novel. This is true perhaps because it strikes at the experience from a basic level. He highlights sensations of shame, of guilt, of betrayal, of needing to return home. Schlink, by juxtaposing the affair between Michael and Hanna with a Nazi trial, addressed the idea of seduction, of culpability, of passion. This was achieved in such a way that the taboo surrounding the affair of an older woman and a younger man mixed with the tinge of Nazi appeal, and Nazi horror, striking a chord within the human psyche most readers would rather deny. The form of the novel itself facilitates this goal. The conclusion of each section is marked by Hannah exiting Michael's life, while her influence remains. The less familiar Hannah is the Michael, the more familiar the holocaust becomes to him. But the same way Hannah is unreachable, the holocaust is never fully intelligible. On the one hand, Hannah sought to destroy, or at least bury, her past. On the other, Michael is struggling to come to terms with his past. But again, he struggles with where his past begins and where the holocaust ends, if in fact it has. The idea of dealing with the past runs through the entire novel which is told by a mature man, beginning with his adolescent years. As one becomes more involved in the novel, one is drawn further and further toward the present. What the present signifies is a relationship to the past and action, i.e. the latter's inability to escape the former. All in all, the novel is artfully written, weaving different perspectives into an almost coherent whole.

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Summary: Discussion of Hanna's illiteracy and culpability
Review: Is Hanna not culpable, due to her illiteracy, for her crimes? Is Hanna's illiteracy a metaphor implying that Germans perpetrated the Holocaust simply out of ignorance? Many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were educated and "cultured," so it doesn't seem that the metaphor is apt. Maybe, the point that Hanna's illiteracy is trying to indicate is that education doesn't protect one from committing a crime. Also, one can easily justify their crime behind the mask of intellectual reasoning. Education can act as a shield, as an excuse. Hanna stands naked in her wrong doing. This book belongs in the tradition of "Sophie's Choice," books that focus on the Holocasut, yet do so from a gentile position. Does the fact that both Sophie and Hanna are anomalies, Hannah in her illiteracy and Sophie as a Polish Catholic, make light of atrocities of the war and therefore diminish its horrors? I don't think so. Even though all of the Holocaust's victims were Jews (the final solution, which the defining element of the Holocaust, was for only Jews), others suffered from the war. Their story is valid, and they have the right to tell it. Through fiction, the reader can become sympathetic towards the perpetrator of a crime. However, to deny one's humanity is wrong. -Sarah

Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking and beautifully written...
Review: I thought The Reader was a wonderful book with characters that could be easily identified with. My only qualms with the book were that it did tend to be a little slow at times and occassionally a bit hard to believe. I think that everyone who has read and enjoyed Camus' The Stranger should read The Reader as well. It was beautiful in its tragedy and heartbreak and yet not the least bit preachy or overdone. Simplicity worked well for The Reader.

Rating:
Summary: strong characters, thin beauty
Review: This book has several areas of lovely, gripping description. But neither the verbal beauty of the book nor its plot is powerful enough to hold the reader. The book's strength lies in its characters; both the narrator and Hanna are strong, unique people who shine through the sometimes-oversimplified language used to describe them. I think the readers who will get the most out of this book are the ones who can relate to the characters--to their personalities, their experiences, or their guilt--regardless of the inadequacies of the text.

Rating:
Summary: A bitter portrayal of a young man's bliss and its aftermath
Review: The Reader paints a vivid, sometimes dry, sometimes poetic, journey of a young man's development of sexuality, intellect, and a system of values, weaving all of these facets together and ending his tipsy turning knit with a knot of disillusionment. The narrator, after taking us through his first sexual encounters with a woman twice his age, a train conductor who turns out to be an illiterate Nazi, and through her prosecution for war crimes and his coinciding discovery of her guilt, dedicates a small partition of his literary time to explaining the process by which he comes to peace with his adolescent affair and with himself. The most touching and humane aspect of relationship between the two characters is the woman Hanna's illiteracy and reliance upon as well as passion for hearing great works of literature read aloud to her by our narrator Michael. The two characters, each evidently in need of personal growth at the time of their first encounters, albeit for similar reasons, do in fact grow, while apart from each other, and, after Hanna's release from prison the two are united to compare growths; our narrator telling Hanna that he is "proud of her" for learning to read and write, which is touching, we feel, as he has almost certainly inspired her to do so by sending her tape recordings of his voice during the eighteen years in which she is held captive in prison, as she tells him, "You've grown up, kid." Shortly thereafter, she hangs herself, leaving a note instructing good intentions with regard to an accompanying tin filled with money that she hopes will provide some consolation to a surviving victim of her Nazi prison camp affairs. The narrator donates this money to a Jewish fund for the prevention of illiteracy on her behalf. What he in turn receives is a computer generated thank you response with the name of his former lover mechanically printed before a comma, which he takes with him to stand for the "first and only" time at the grave of this illiterate beauty submissive and controlled by forces beyond her cognizance who, having redemption politely tap her on the shoulder, turned and slapped it in the face, perhaps out of realization of the general futility of most everything when faced with larger opposition which exists in undertones throughout the novel.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating not for its romance, but for historical context
Review: Schlink pulls her reader in from the very beginning. We then stay completely engaged by her imaginary, eroticism, and over-all flow throughout the novel, making it a quick and pleasurable read. However, this is certainly not the point of The Reader. It is profoundly thought provoking. While it is easy to get swept away the passion between Micheal and Hanna at the beginning of the novel, one must also keep in mind the historical context. It was (and is) such a difficult point in Germany's history. Hanna and Micheal are but devices for Schlink's ponderings on the issues that post WWII Germany faced. The real food for thought did not come from the romance, but from Micheal final musings on the "collective guilt", and how it affected every aspect of his own story. Readers of The Reader should keep this in mind before being so quick to judge.

Rating:
Summary: Promising premise falls short
Review: I was somewhat disappointed by this book. With all of its back-cover promises of moral challenges to the reader, Schlink backed down precisely where he should have held his ground. By sentamentalizing his main conflict, he compromised any of the prospectively troubling situations he raised with the novel's unique multi-taboo premise. Where the novel could have been emotionally and intellectually effectual, it ended in being simply a somewhat forgettable, if enjoyable, piece.