Review: The Reader

Fifteen year old Michael Berg gets sick on his way home from school one day and he is helped by Hanna Schmitz.  After he’s better, he goes by to thank Hanna and they embark on an affair.  He sees her as often as possible and when Hanna asks Michael what he’s studying in school, he begins reading to her.  Their affair continues until Hanna mysteriously leaves town one day.

Michael doesn’t see Hanna again until he’s a law student attending the trial of Nazi war criminals for a seminar he’s taking.  He’s shocked to see Hanna is one of the female guards being tried.  He attends the trial every day and slowly comes to the realization that Hanna is illiterate. While he’s attending the trial, Michael thinks,

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it.  But it was too terrible for that.  When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned.  When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding.

Hanna accepts more blame, and a harsher sentence because of it, rather than admit to the shame of being illiterate.  After Hanna is in prison for several years, Michael starts recording books on cassette tapes and mailing them to her, because he can’t get her out of his mind.  After several years in prison, Hanna writes Michael and note and he says,

I read the note and was filled with joy and jubilation.  “She can write, she can write!” In these years I had read everything I could lay my hands on to do with illiteracy.  I knew about the helplessness in everyday activities, finding one’s way or finding an address or choosing a meal in a restaurant, about how illiterates anxiously stick to prescribed patterns and familiar routines, about how much energy it takes to conceal one’s inability to read and write, energy lost to actual living.  Illiteracy is dependence.

Wow,  The Reader by Bernhard Schlink is a book full of controversial subjects!  If this book doesn’t make you think, nothing will.  It would make a great book club pick because there is just so much to talk about in it.  First is the love affair between a minor and a grown woman.  During the war trial, Michael never absolves the guards of guilt, but questions how much of the blame the society that allowed the atrocities to go on should shoulder.  I was struck by how many of the choices in Hanna’s life were made because of her shame in being illiterate.  It made me even more thankful that I can read.  This book does contain sexual situations, but I recommend it and the movie that was made from it.