Author: Bernhard Schlink
Review by: Susie Sparks, Calgary Reads Volunteer Tutor
My mother became blind in the last years of her life. She had always been a voracious reader with an eclectic passion for novels and history and politics and non-fiction so, as her vision slowly faded, in a very real sense her world diminished along with her sight.
She had no patience for books on tape, but she loved having me read to her. I think it was because she felt free to stop and talk about a passage of text, or to share a memory evoked by the writer’s description of a particular scene. In a curious way we were, I’m sure, reversing the roles we had played when I was a child learning to read.
By that time my own children were grown and I remember thinking how, as they had become independent readers, we lost that special time together. And I know how very grateful I was to have found this time – once again – with my mother. The Reader (by Bernhard Schlink) reminded me of that powerful memory… and took me far beyond.
Schlink’s reader is Michael, a 15-year old boy, economically-and-academically-privileged in pre-war Germany. He becomes ill one day on his way home from school and is rescued by Hanna, a much older woman who works as a streetcar ticket taker. She eventually becomes his lover and encourages him to read to her from his school books, each trading what they can offer the other.
In his self-absorbed adolescent arrogance, it never occurs to him to wonder why Hanna asks this of him, and as he develops more confidence in his own sexuality, he turns to the teenage girls of his own class. Hanna realizes that Michael has outgrown her and she leaves the city without saying goodbye.
Much later, after he has grown up and become a law student, Michael sits in on the post-war trial of a group of female Nazi concentration camp guards accused of war crimes; among them is Hanna. Oddly, she makes no attempt to defend herself. Michael makes no effort to help her, despite suddenly realizing that Hanna is illiterate, and that she is so ashamed of that fact she is willing to spend the rest of her life in prison rather than to reveal this truth.
Schlink focuses on the young man’s betrayal of Hanna and forces us to examine our own souls. As time passes, Michael tries to mitigate his guilt by sending Hanna hundreds of books he painstakingly records on tape. But he never visits her nor does he identify himself in any way. Each remains trapped in their own isolation.
Great questions to ask at your book club:
- What is the significance of the title? Who is “the reader”?
- “The notion of secrecy is central to literature.” What role does secrecy play in the in each character?
- Is it a love story? If not, can you describe Michael and Hanna’s relationship?
- Some reviewers have said that Hanna is a totally unsympathetic character. Do you agree? How does she change after she goes to prison?
- How about Michael? Is he a sympathetic character? How does he change in the course of the novel?
- Why do you think Hanna was so completely consumed by her responsibility to carry out the order to keep the prisoners in the church?
- Why do you think Hanna rescued Michael as well as the young girls in the concentration camp?
- Is there a relationship between literacy and morality?
- At the trial Michael’s law professor says, “It’s law, not morality, that is at stake.” But a student responds, “How could you let this happen and why didn’t you kill yourself when you found out?”
- The Reader is all about guilt – personal guilt, national guilt, the guilt of the perpetrators as well as those who stood by and let it happen. What is our moral responsibility to one another and toward humanity? What did you think about the woman in New York who told Michael, “Using it (Hanna’s money) for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant.”
