Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germanys Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. 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 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 post-war Germany. 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 post-war Germany. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germanys pre and post-war generations, between the guilty and the innocent and between words and silence. 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? Schlinks prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue and excess in any form. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose? The Reader, which won the Boston Book Reviews Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. 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.
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