The Reader (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage International)
by Bernhard Schlink
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bernhard SchlinkEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-11-25
ISBN: 0307454894
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Reader (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage International)
Book Review: a cinematographic review
Summary: 5 Stars
I haven't read the book, but just saw the movie on the eve of the Oscars and have been more affected by this more than any other movie of my life I think. Its grey-shaded ambiguity really made me philosophically ponder the complexities presented and all night my subconscious wrestled with theme and meaning until in the morning I awoke with an insight (as so often happens in that alpha/theta twilight zone). Don't we all place people in a burning church sometimes and lock the doors? Didn't Michael effectively do that to Hannah in the end?
"What would you have done?" Hannah asks her judge in one of the most poignant sentences of the movie, referring to her assiduously carrying out the responsibilities of her "job". I ask myself, what would I do if someone I loved only as deeply as one can love one's first love and the one who has exquisitely introduced one to the world of sex and the heart, if I discovered that the beloved had committed a heinous crime? How would I feel about that person and about myself in my capacity to love someone who could commit mass murder by action and by neglect?
Beyond the generational German themes mentioned in other reviews, the practical consideration of issues deeper than forgiveness, victim, victimizer, guilt emerge: How does compassion for self and the other manifest in this complex story of heart opening and closing and opening and closing? Visually I am imprinted with the eloquence of Hannah's mute head shakes in the bathtub after the anguish and argument of the trolley scene. Do you forgive me? Do you hate me? Do you love me? Wow. A hurting human emerges. Second visual: Hannah, lover of words, is moved to tears, her head on her young lover's chest, nourished beyond food, sex, surroundings to her very soul by beauty of language which she herself cannot decipher nor express as it appears on paper.
What kind of colossal shame chooses 18 years in prison over the admission that one cannot read nor write? . . . and suffers the injustice of suffering for 5 others who happily pile all the blame and hatred on a woman who is innocent of the particular if not the general accusations of degree of murderous responsibility? This shame apparently shapes every aspect of her life.
In all other parts of the trial, Hanna was guilessly honest. She was uber-responsible to both her job as ticket-taker and her job of guard -true macabrely so for the latter. What values in what order of priority brought her to the point of participating willingly in the excruciatingly painful deaths of at least 300 human beings? Who can say from the perspective of one's own different life what Hanna should have done? She acted from the life she had lived.
Why did Hanna hang herself? I think Michael rekindled the possibility that she mattered to somebody. But he couldn't offer her an unmixed compassion, particularly without some sign that she had "learned" from her "mistake" and its consequences. For Hanna to encounter compassion mixed with something akin to revulsion when her unexamined mind had so simply lived out the punishment that was meted to her, must have been more than she could bear to see in her former-lover's face. She took it into herself and took herself out of it all, finally. Gave herself that absolution at least.
Visually I wonder what was the meaning of the contrast of the very opulent apartment of the Holocaust survivor with the sparse, closet-sized cell of Hanna - with its magazine cutouts of flowers taped to the wall by her bed? What about the survivor's statement that the camps were not a place where learning took place --- as the prison was not a place for Hannah to learn anything either, except to read? She served her time with a good chunk of her life -warm, fed and clothed it is true but ongoingly horrific all the same no doubt. Beyond the Absolute where forgiveness does not even need to exist, there is the Relative, where accountability plays out. It seems to me no human could do more penance than Hannah did for herself and five others and maybe Germany at large. And what, after all, did Michael learn from his experience? Perhaps that he was a distancer who withheld love. I expect, however that he absorbed those traits from his parents more than from his experience with Hanna. I'm sure he learned from her some things his family of origin could never have taught him.
I look forward to reading the book for the possibility that I might gain more insight into the inner workings of the characters than a purely visual portrayal of this story, albeit by the most extraordinary of actors, can give.
Summary of The Reader (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage International)
Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover?then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
Oprah Book ClubŪ Selection, February 1999: Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable.... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"
The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. What does it mean to love those people--parents, grandparents, even lovers--who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink's prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue, and excess in any form. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany's pre- and postwar generations, between the guilty and the innocent, and between words and silence. --R. Ellis
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