I greatly enjoyed this small gem of a book. It abounds in paradox. The story is simple, yet laden with complexities. Michael is of the generation whose parents were adults in the Third Reich, bequeathing his cohort a horrifying burden of shame and outrage. Add to that the confusion of a precocious sexual relationship and we have a narrator whose innocence has truly been stolen. Both Hanna and Michael wage lonely struggles to make right out of terrible wrongs. It is left to the reader (apt, that) to determine how well they succeed. This is a haunting story.
Here’s another classic I’ve finally gotten around to reading. The first German book to top the New York Times bestseller list, The Reader is both disturbing and inspiring. The protagonist, Michael, (the titular reader) is seduced as a teen by Hanna, a woman over twice his age, who awakens him sexually and spoils him for anyone else. She disappears only to resurface as a defendant in a Nazi war crimes trial he is observing as a law student. He struggles with his feelings about who she is, what she may or may not have done and his own possible moral obligation to reveal a truth about her that he alone seems to know.
I greatly enjoyed this small gem of a book. It abounds in paradox. The story is simple, yet laden with complexities. Michael is of the generation whose parents were adults in the Third Reich, bequeathing his cohort a horrifying burden of shame and outrage. Add to that the confusion of a precocious sexual relationship and we have a narrator whose innocence has truly been stolen. Both Hanna and Michael wage lonely struggles to make right out of terrible wrongs. It is left to the reader (apt, that) to determine how well they succeed. This is a haunting story.
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AuthorFreda Hansburg is a psychologist and co-author of two Archives
December 2016
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