Review - The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Publisher: Pantheon Books 1997
Hardback 218 pages




I read this book twice in the matter of two days. I couldn't help myself. As I started to write the review for this book I found that nothing that I said, no words that I could write, could convey the meaning I had found within its pages.

At the very heart of this book, this is a story of love and guilt. Love bred of desire and shame, need and insecurity. The story starts with a love affair. 15 year old Michael Berg falls ill coming home from school one day and is helped by a single woman, 20 years his senior, Hanna. After a long illness, Michael returns to thank the woman and finds himself drawn to her strength and assuredness. His desire and hers, for reasons we never fully understand, draw them into an affair. As part of their daily ritual of love making, Hanna begins to make Michael read to her. As the affair continues, Hanna's erratic, domineering and sometimes violent behavior casts a shadow on his love for her. The affair ends abruptly one day when Hanna leaves town, with no warning and no clue as to where she went. Michael finds himself dead with guilt over her disappearance, blaming himself for her need to flee.

Fast forward ten years later. Michael is a law student, observing a trial of several women accused of war crimes during the second world war. Hanna is one of the defendants. As the trial progresses, Michael is haunted by the guilt of the past, and struggles to find what, if any, responsibility he bears for this woman he once loved. It is during the trial that Michael first comes to realize Hanna's startling secret (and a secret that was obvious to me at the start of this novel). This book is more about a young man's guilt however, it is also about a national guilt that was felt for generations after WWII. Michael's shame at loving Hanna is tied to the greater feelings of shame and guilt that the entire nation felt after the war. The novel also explores the generational differences in experiencing this guilt; from Michael and Hanna and from Michael and his father.

The last act of the book is after Hanna has been convicted and sentenced to life in jail for her crimes during the war. Here is where I will stop, because it is at this point where one must experience for oneself the way love and guilt resolves themselves in Michael's mind. This is a novel that I am sure that I will come to again and again in my life.