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Loading... The Readerby Bernhard Schlink
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A hypnotic read, though it left me feeling strangely uncomfortable which, no doubt, was the author's intention. I don't want to ruin this fine book for others by saying more. (  ) Mindsetter | Nov 8, 2009 |  I had to continue reading this book just to assure myself that it was going to turn out as badly as I'd predicted. It did. I found it trite, annoying, and generally without redeeming qualities other than it was at least possible to finish. . . . were we really supposed to NOT know Hanna's "secret"? Seriously? (  ) LauraLittlePony | Nov 4, 2009 | A story about a 15-year old boy's brief, secret and intense affair with a much older woman, which marked him for life. What started out as a purely physical and obsessive daily encounter goes beyond the animal encounter of possession and subjugation and even acquires an element of romance when the boy begins to read literature to her. They do not share anything but these couple of blissful hours everyday, they do not share each other's stories. But the boy is 15, and there were other things in life which started to interest him. Yet he clings to her. Then one day she disappears. Devastation and guilt of his "denial" of her haunt him, and her memory relentlessly follows him.They meet again, many years after, he a student lawyer attending a trial, and she, a defendant. He finds out she was an SS guard, guilty of monstrous deeds. The story is fascinating and is written in lucid almost unfeeling prose, but i did not find it profound or compelling as many do. There was lack of character development -- one never gets into the skin or the mind of any of them. Also, I would have preferred if the author had explored the "secondary" theme of how the generation of Germans born after the Holocaust "dealt" with the generation of their parents and their collective guilt. There is also some disconnect in the story, such as why the woman would think the "shame" of her being found out to be illiterate justifies her self-destructive behavior. A so-so read for me. (  )1  deebee1 | Nov 2, 2009 | Es breve, escrito con precisión y belleza, interesante, impactante, triste. Un descubrimiento. Casi (pero no tanto) en la liga de Esperando A Los Bárbaros. (  ) membrillu | Oct 30, 2009 | Es breve, escrito con precisión y belleza, interesante, impactante, triste. Un descubrimiento. Casi (pero no tanto) en la liga de Esperando A Los Bárbaros. ( ) membrillu | Oct 30, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0375707972, Paperback)Oprah Book Club® 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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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