Review: The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

I'm tearing through books as quickly as I pick them up, which is a nice change from the slow, tedious slog that was the past few months.  I'm also really enjoying contemporary literature more than I have in years.  Plus, the faster I read these, the sooner I can justify spending money to get more books, right?  Right.

Bernhard Schlink's The Reader is told in three parts from the POV of Michael Berg, a young man growing up in the tumultuous 1950s in post-war Germany.  Michael is fifteen years old when he becomes desperately ill en route to his home, and he is rescued by the kind help of station employee Hanna, a woman in her mid-thirties.  When Michael goes to Hanna's house to thank her for her assistance, the two begin a long, passionately obsessive love affair.  Then one day, Hanna disappears, without leaving a forwarding address.  Years later, while in college and taking a seminar on the legal system, Michael encounters Hanna again -- this time, while she's on trial for a terrible crime connected to the Holocaust.  As Michael watches the trial unfold, and witnesses Hanna's silence and refusal to defend herself, he begins to discover that there's a deeper secret that Hanna's been hiding -- from her legal team, from the prosecution, and from Michael himself.

This is one of those books where I thought I could predict the ending before even reading it.  I haven't seen the film adaptation that gave Kate Winslet her long-awaited Oscar, but after hearing enough about it, I figured I had the story adequately summed up.  Still, the way that the story unfolds sets you up, and when the ending that I was expecting did happen, I had already been lulled into a false sense of security, of thinking that I'd been wrong.  NOPE.  It hit me like a full-on slap in the face.

The story is sad, it's dark, and it can be slow at times, but that is in its nature.  Schlink is writing a story illustrating the general reaction of the German people to the Holocaust, years and years after it happened.  While Hanna struggles with what she has allegedly done, and Michael attempts to come to grips with his emotions regarding their defunct love affair, post-war Germany struggles with its identity.  How to react to a crime so large and unimaginable?  How to preserve your face as your reputation shreds itself at your feet?

Rating: ***