This book by Bernhard Schlink is about a man’s love affair with an older woman during WWII. He felt in love with her when he was a teenager, but she left him suddenly one day. They re-encountered several years later in the court room, when she was on trial as a Nazi SS guard and he was a law student observing her case. He then discovered her secret - that she was illiterate. He read stories and recorded them on tapes and sent them to her in prison. Slowly she taught herself how to read and write and wrote letters to him, but he never wrote back. After serving in prison for 18 years, and on the day of her release, a tragedy happened…
On surface “The Reader” is a love story, but in essence it explores the guilt and shame and the complex feelings the German second generation had towards the evil-doings of the Nazi government, participated by their parents. The crimes committed were too horrifying and beyond the younger generations’ comprehension and forgiveness, but they didn’t know how to confront their parents, or the people they loved that were involved in these crimes.
This is a gripping and psychologically complex book. There are many books on Holocaust and Nazi crimes, but this is one of the first that is devoted to portraying the emotions of the second generation. Some critics accused Schlink for trying to use illiteracy as a possible excuse for some Nazi criminals, and claimed that illiteracy and the capacity of moral judgment are not related. I only partly agree. The woman was clearly an involuntary victim of her uneducatedness.
read both his the reader and flights of love some years ago. both are deeply moving piece of literature.
btw, i just got suskind’s perfume from the library. planning to re-read it soon.
still struggling with vreeland’s luncheon of the boating party. i took it with me to the car service place the other day, hoping to have a good read while i waited. sadly, i soon dozed off, and the book banged on the floor, scaring many others and thoroughly embarrassing myself.
Haha, so the book was boring?
i will also give u my copy of perfume so that u can re-read it any time u want.
you know what? i just noticed a few minutes ago that inside the library copy of perfume was a checkouts slip (i.e. a list of borrowed books) belonging to a certain gentleman. the two books he had borrowed from the library, as printed on the slip, were perfume and the reader!
Oh, is there a way you can contact this gentleman as he seems to share our reading taste!