Apparently, she can't get enough of his stories. So their sexual escapades are now connected to prolonged reading sessions which each one of them enjoys. But Hanna still remains an enigma to Michael with her erratic behaviour, an enigma which becomes all the more inexplicable when she disappears on the threshold of her promotion as tram driver.
The next time he sees her, she is in the dock. Hanna is charged as a Nazi war criminal, a guard of a small concentration camp near Cracow, a satellite camp for Auschwitz. She is accused, along with others, of causing the death of a group of camp inmates by locking them up in a burning church. As a law student, Michael is covering her trial. Hanna's strange, self-destructive behaviour in the courtroom as well as her unusual acts as the camp guard providing vulnerable young inmates with special status in the camp, to read books to her, until they were sent to Auschwitz to their death intrigue him.
One day, linking it to their sex-cum-reading sessions, he makes a startling discovery about his one-time lover Later on, Michael is a disillusioned middle-aged man, with a failed marriage and a colourless life. He finds that he cannot exorcise Hanna from his psyche. At the end of his tether, he hits upon a unique solution: Michael finds solace for himself, as well as redemption for Hanna, through his old medium - that of reading. Is it about paedophilia, or an adolescent fantasy? Is it about Nazism, and man's cruelty towards man?
Is it the tale of a Germany coming to terms with its Nazi past, disguised as a coming-of-age story? I, personally, would like to see it as an allegory on the redemptive power of storytelling. In all cultures, bards enjoyed a special, revered status - in India, it approaches the divine think of Vyasa and Valmiki. Here, Hanna's sins - both the carnal as well as the homicidal - are linked with getting stories read to her; so, unusually, is her redemption in the last part of the book.
Hanna Schmidt is a masterly creation. This is one holocaust story which does not take the trodden path. This book just fell short with me, on oh so many levels. One thing that did intrigue me and that I have not yet seen much of is the perspective of Germans after the Holocaust and their views on the Third Reich and Hitler's agenda, especially of the younger generation of that time.
That was really the only thing that struck me about this book. The rest was just not enough. For one, the affair between MIchael and Hanna was deplorable.
Is it supposed to not be as bothersome because it is an older w This book just fell short with me, on oh so many levels. Is it supposed to not be as bothersome because it is an older woman with a teenage boy, rather than an older man with a teenage girl? Either way, in my opinion, it's just not palatable and I felt neither sympathy for either of the characters nor did I feel that it was relatable on many levels at all whatsoever.
The writing fell flat for me and was rather dry. Not in the beautiful sparse language trends of Hemingway, but in an annoying succinct manner that just left each situation as it occurred "as is" with nothing left to ponder. I noticed that this novel has won awards and while it means absolutely nothing to me because her choices are not always great or even good in the least, but it was on Oprah's Book Club list a number of years back.
Neither are good enough reasons for anyone to read this book, in my opinion. Spare yourselves and read a nice historical account of Germany after the Holocaust, if you are inclined. I am sure it would be much richer reading in any case than this novel. Kate Winslet was even better than I'd expected, and that's saying quite a bit. Maybe I'll finally get serious about improving my German I finished Der Vorleser a week or so ago, and for once I [Before reading: posted late ] Haven't read it, but was completely blown away by the movie.
I finished Der Vorleser a week or so ago, and for once I just didn't know what to say. Everything I thought of seemed inadequate. But then yesterday I started Romain Gary's Chien blanc , which a French friend had recommended to me, and after a couple of hours I found a scene that brought everything into focus.
In Gary's supposedly autobiographical novel, the author, who's living in LA, adopts a stray dog, a German shepherd he calls Batka. Gary is a dog person, Batka is a kind, good-natured dog, and they really hit it off. Within days, Gary and his wife feel he's part of the family. But then a terrible and unexpected thing happens. A guy comes to clean their pool, and the moment Batka sees the visitor he's transformed into a murderous, snarling beast.
Teeth bared, he lunges at the terrified pool cleaner, who's luckily still on the other side of the gate. Gary can barely hold him back.
He apologises profusely and the pool cleaner, still shaking, leaves. A couple of days later, the same thing happens again, this time with a Western Union delivery boy.
Gary thinks about it, and there's a link between the two incidents which is distressingly obvious: the pool cleaner and the delivery boy were both black, all their other visitors that week have been white. He takes Batka to a friend who's an expert on animals, and the friend confirms his suspicions. Batka is a "white dog", a dog who's been painstakingly trained to attack blacks. They have them in the American South.
Originally, they tracked escaped slaves; now the police use them against demonstrators. Gary's friend says Batka, who is about seven, is way too old to be retrained and is highly dangerous. The only sensible thing is to put him down. Gary sits with the dog for several hours. Then he takes Batka to his car and visits a friend who lends him a revolver. They drive out to an isolated place in the woods.
They get out of the car. Batka is happy to be with his master. He sits expectantly, waiting for new instructions. Gary takes out the revolver. Batka knows what is is, but he doesn't run. He just sits where he is, looking at Gary sadly. Gary aims, but he's now crying so much that he can't see properly. He fires and misses. Batka still doesn't run. Instead, he slowly walks over to Gary and licks the barrel of the gun. Gary can't take any more. They get back in the car and drive home. Well, Der Vorleser is like that.
Except that it's not a stray dog he's known for a week, it's the love of his life. View all 24 comments. Just not for me. Hated both characters. I didn't feel sorry for either of them. You don't matter enough to upset me. View all 11 comments. An Intensely powerful story and I'm still thinking "What do I do with this one??
She helps him and they begin a relationship. He reads to her, and the intimacy is so strong that I'm not even sure how I should feel about it. It feels real and raw, and dripping in lust, while at the same time, it feels wrong, and I'm left feeling something hollow and wondering if the moral que An Intensely powerful story and I'm still thinking "What do I do with this one??
It feels real and raw, and dripping in lust, while at the same time, it feels wrong, and I'm left feeling something hollow and wondering if the moral question is bigger than the reality. Their relationship is complex and detailed. So many emotions and thoughts cross my mind, and at the end of the book, I'm still not sure how I should feel.
View all 25 comments. She helps him and the two start to have a very passionate and erotic affair together. They make love and the boy starts reading regularly to the woman and becomes her reader. Many years later when Michael becomes a law student, he is shocked to see the same woman on a trial in Germany being questioned about her role in a horrible war crime. Faced with a dilemma, Michael knows a secret about Hanna that she keeps hiding and could reduce her sentence.
But will he do it? Will he betray her? I'm not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love.
It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.
I have watched the movie adaptation which stars Kate Winslet in which she portrayed the main character Hanna for which she won the Academy Award for best actress that year. I understand this is not a story that is suitable for every reader. There are several trigger warnings. Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?
I feel both the main characters were persons with so little to say yet their emotions talked a lot about them.
There is a lot that this story tells without the need to get into tedious details. I loved it! The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.
Lust, love, obsession, or compulsion? They make love and he reads to her every night. He questions his actions and Hanna's reactions, his faults and hers. He can't decide who is at blame. Years later, she is on trial for the choices she made prior to meeting Michael. He watches from a distance, still questioning who she is to him.
Mercy and longing saturate this book. Novels that make me feel something are rare. This one took me somewhere. After all, the germans were not more ignorant than other people at the time. Far from it. For Hanna, there was nothing wrong on being a SS guard in a concentration camp. It was part of her job, as it was for thousands of others. Allegedly, they were just following the law of the time and did not dare to reflect if it was right or wrong. As people hardly ever do, at all times.
The illiteracy means the absence of the power to question and to confront, a sort of numbness we feel as we follow a tedious daily routine. Michael read Hanna romances, but also books on ethics and moral.
Therefore, she also learned with him to interpret her own life and found out her own responsibility in what happened to prisoners sent to Auschwitz. She learned further about it reading books about concentration camps. That also happened to the generation who lived during the war and took part on it. They only realized the magnitude of their doings as the war was over, as the Allies found the piles of bodies in camps, published their photos in newspapers and as germans faced their accusators.
Before Hanna was released, she realized that she would not find forgiveness and understanding outside. Not even from the one who had loved her, what brought her to suicide. By the way, one thing I like about the film that is not on the book is the last scene, where Michael decides to tell his daughter the role Hanna played in his life. In Germany I have seen many parents in memorials to jews and museums telling their children who Hitler was and that what he did was wrong.
It is relieving to find out that they have learned that only open dialogue and discussion about what happened can avoid it from happening again. And also help people to come to terms with it. Great reading! View all 4 comments. While this was a fairly quick read, and admittedly, I found myself quite immersed from the first few pages, this story failed to give me a sense of the feels, and any real liking or pity, for any of the characters.
It may sound harsh, but it is exactly how I feel having finished this book this morning. This is a story set around a love affair between a fifteen year old boy, and a woman in her thirties. Although "making love" is mentioned frequently, and our main characters seem to spend most of t While this was a fairly quick read, and admittedly, I found myself quite immersed from the first few pages, this story failed to give me a sense of the feels, and any real liking or pity, for any of the characters.
Although "making love" is mentioned frequently, and our main characters seem to spend most of their precious days doing so, I cannot say this is as erotic as others say.
Personally, I have read other books which I would definitely put higher on the scale. The book jumps straight into the love affair, which I wasn't expecting, and it develops from there. Hanna was an odd character, and I believe she was actually very lonely. It is only nearing the end we learn how much of a complex person she really was.
This story has a Holocaust setting, which originally attracted me to the book, and I do think the way in which it is used, really gives the reader an opportunity to think about moral, and what is right. It was easy to read and fairly interesting, but I've knocked a couple of stars off for the lack of character development.
I simply couldn't connect with them. I thought this was an interesting if not somewhat disturbing story, but not one that particularly blew me away. The questions of morality and complicity are intriguing as well; probably my favorite parts of the story where Michael's recollections of his experiences and trying to make sense of which were good, how he should feel about them in hindsight, etc.
Glad I finally read this because it is so famous but not one that I'm in love with. View all 3 comments. There will always be some substantial gaps among peoples. This gap, however, is not of caste or class or gender. It is the gap of shallowed empathetic experience. The Reader is about this gap. It is about the mystery of what something must have felt like and this 'something' in the book is Holocaust.
Michael Berg, the narrator, is the 'second generation' of the Holocaust. His relationship with an older woman, one of the SS guards at the Nazi camp, is the relationship of the 'first generation' wi There will always be some substantial gaps among peoples.
His relationship with an older woman, one of the SS guards at the Nazi camp, is the relationship of the 'first generation' with the 'second'. The novel questions what the second generation would do. This question, like Hanna's question to the judge ". The novel is packed in many intricate and complex layers. It leaves many questions that will remain unanswered; at least, in my case, the questions are still wavering around.
I have no hopes of ever finding any answer. As I said, there will always be the gaps of shallowed empathetic experience. May 09, Friederike Knabe rated it it was amazing Shelves: german-lit. The topic of the Holocaust is raised almost every day in some manner. Many books have been written about the topic. Whether in studies, documentaries or fictional accounts, finger-pointing at the perpetrators of the crimes against millions has been part of the process of coming to terms with the Nazi atrocities.
For Imre Kertesz, renowned author and Nobel laureate of , there is no other topic. Yet, when he reflects on the traumatic impact of Auschwitz, "he dwells on the vitality and creativi The topic of the Holocaust is raised almost every day in some manner. Yet, when he reflects on the traumatic impact of Auschwitz, "he dwells on the vitality and creativity of those living today" and "thus, paradoxically, not on the past but the future.
The usually unambiguous distinction between villain and victim has facilitated the identification with those who lost their lives or suffered under the Nazi atrocities while all scorn, abhorrence and hate was piled on the perpetrators. Until recently, few books have focused on the after-war generation. While growing up, the children had to come to terms with the, often sudden, exposure of their parents' active or passive participation in the crimes of the Nazi regime.
Michael, while not refuting guilt, shame, and atonement, is led to examine and dissect the complexity of inter-generational conflicts in the context of his personal experiences. Like Schlink himself, he grapples with the fundamental problem of the relationships between these two generations. Michael recounts the most important stages in his life, starting with experiences long passed in his youth. While his account follows the chronology of events, he progressively interleaves retrospective reflections on his past conduct, questioning his conflicting emotions - his behaviour.
The story starts with Michael's first, secret, love affair at age 15 with a woman more than twice his age. The blossoming erotic relationship strengthens his self-worth and confidence yet, at the same time, increasingly isolating him from his family and peers. Hanna Schmitz, of whose circumstances and background Michael knew very little, was affectionate and standoffish at the same time, prone to abrupt mood swings.
The young lover is completely captivated and eager to please. He is the "Reader", in German "Vorleser" is a person who reads aloud to an audience. At her insistence he reads his books to her and it becomes an important element of their shared intimacy. When she disappears one day without any warning, her loss leaves him devastated and scarred for life. He can only seek the reasons in his own actions.
Seeing Hanna again years later and in unanticipated surroundings, triggers a flood of questions about the person he loved and thought he knew. Her behaviour raises many questions and Michael discovers a long secret that puts in doubt the facts as they are exposed. He also wrestles with himself over his own inaction when confronted with choices. It encapsulates the primary dilemma of the child-parent generations relationships.
Finally, writing the story of his life, drafting and redrafting it in his head until it is in a publishable form, is seen as a chance for his own recovery and for living his own life. The Reader, while a work of fiction, is deeply anchored in the personal experiences of the author and symbolic for his generation. His spare and unemotional language underlines the impression of a biographical investigation and is used quite deliberately. The English translation captures the tone and style amazingly well.
Reading this book should not be an "easy pleasure" as some reviewers have suggested. The Reader covers difficult and complex terrain in a way that it forces the reader to reflect and question their own position long afterwards.
Although written directly for a German audience of Schlink's and my generation, the novel, surprisingly, has attracted world-wide attention. While reviews and reactions among readers are highly diverse and even contradictory, it should be read by as many people as possible and with the care the subject matter deserves. This is not a book that I wanted to read.
So many times while reading books about the Holocaust, I feel a disconnectedness from the events. It's a mixture of two things. The first is that the sheer scope of events is just too large, too horrific, for one person's words to do justice to it. The second, and this could partly be due to the first problem, is that I detest being manipulated by my books.
With a lot of Holocaust literature the villains are stock characters; the malevolent Colonel with This is not a book that I wanted to read. With a lot of Holocaust literature the villains are stock characters; the malevolent Colonel with no humanity, staring cold-eyed at the prisoners before sending them off to their deaths. I find this to be a drastic over-simplification of the tragedy and one with a great potential for allowing such a dehumanizing event to occur again. It's simple to hate Count Dracula or Emperor Palpatine.
They have no identity aside from their thirst for power and willingness to inflict any cruelty for any whim. They are a delightfully uncomplicated type, divorced from standard concepts of morality- purely evil. Nazis, quite understandably, get tarred in this same way. We see the pictures of bodies stacked hundreds of feet high at Bergen-Belsen, the haunted eyes staring out past barbed wire, the jackboots marching in lockstep, The Triumph of the Will - these are all images etched into the collective memory.
No civilized person could do such a thing, the mind recoils. These are not people but demons brought to Earth. This is a phenomenal disservice to those who suffered so horrifically at their hands. How can we properly work to prevent such a travesty from ever occurring again when we choose to reject these people from the human community? We need to understand what can move someone to such a place that pushing the button to fill a shower with Zyklon B is just another day at the office.
We need to see how easy it is to give in to what Hannah Arendt dubbed the "banality of evil. Allowing Nazis to become human in our mind does not excuse any of the crimes they committed. Rather it opens us up to the understanding that the same potential exists in all of us.
When we understand this, that we all have the capability of becoming something monstrous simply through acquiescing to the dominant trends in society, by going with the flow, only then can we truly make strides in guaranteeing the truth of the mantra "Never Again. It is as easy as taking a new job to avoid having a shameful secret found out at an old one. Unable to attend? Please let us know by emailing boxoffice bl.
Choose Yes please to open the survey in a new browser window or tab, and then complete it when you are ready. Becoming a Reader. Desks in a British Library reading room. Something happened when I went back to that fallen book, though. I found myself appreciating not just the rest of the book, but everything that had happened since the time I'd first closed it.
It was story and sacrament in one, a healing that I never expected. So, instead of beginning one of the many new titles I'd amassed, I returned to the scene of the crime again.
And this reunion—with Babylon's Ashes , the sixth book in the Expanse saga of sci-fi novels—was even sweeter. With so much life waiting in my reading list, I'm ready to leave my other ghosts behind. But next time you put down a book, remember this: It's not you. It's not the book, either. OK, maybe it's the book. It's the timing. A year down the road, maybe more, that book might be just the thing you need. Maybe you need to grow into it; maybe it needs to grow into you. But you're not going to discover that connection if you pretend it never happened.
Anything can drive you away from reading—but only a book will bring you back. Going back to school means new books, new binders, and new gear. But how much does all that cost? How We Read : More in the Series. Contributing Editor Twitter. Topics How We Read Books. The Cost of Going Back to School.
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