'A tender, horrifying novel that shows blazingly well how the Holocaust should be dealt with in fiction. But then suddenly, and terribly, it does - Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret. Much about her behaviour during the trial does not make sense. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. ![]() Ellis From the Inside Flap:īook Description Paperback. ![]() 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. 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. The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?" 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. 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. 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. 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.
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