Bernhard Schlink's The Reader - A Micro-Review

The ReaderThe Reader by Bernhard Schlink

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


What to say about The Reader? Unsettling, thought-provoking, uncomfortable. They all come to mind as ways to describe it. It's also well written, compelling and convincing; while I know the line between truth and fiction is always blurred and especially so in historical fiction, there was a need to remind myself this is not autobiography. Not directly anyway.

But even now as I sit here, having finished it 12 hours ago, I don't know how to feel. But, that's the point isn't it? Schlink has thrown out the rule book on how to feel about such a sacrosanct subject. I do not know Hanna, cannot know her, the narrator in the end does not know her and he knew her better than anyone else. We don't know what she did, why she did what she did or anything else. Only that what she did was, by usual standards unconscionable. Should I even want to understand what can only be condemned?

There are no answers here. Only the questions, and are they not the same questions we must ask ourselves? Are not the same atrocities being enacted around the world on differing scales right now? Do we not ignore, allow, condone such acts? Should we seek to condemn wholesale, or do we try to understand?

The novel suggests that history seeks to build a bridge between the past and the present and the historian must therefore be an active participant in both. In telling of the past here, Schlink builds that bridge, and in crossing it to see the past the reader must confront questions of the present.



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