Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably … disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
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Rating:
Genre: Historical Fiction + Literary Fiction
Michael Berg is a fifteen-year-old boy who by chance meets a woman called Hanna. 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. 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.”
The book consists of three parts and is narrated from Michael’s point of view. 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 loved the film a lot and decided to read the book but I wanted to wait until I couldn’t remember much about the film. Today is about 13 years since I’ve watched the film and while reading the story I kept remembering Kate Winslet in every frame and scene from the book. I understand this is not a story that is suitable for every reader. There are several trigger warnings.
“What is law? 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?”
The writing style is very beautiful and shows lots of emotional depth in a few words. I feel both the main characters were persons with so little to say yet their emotions talked a lot about them. The author brilliantly captured Hanna’s different emotional states without her saying much. Michael’s maturity can be felt by the readers during the three different life stages. When it comes to the subjects the book tackles they are many, the taboo relationship, Holocaust crimes, and crimes against humanity, the shame of illiteracy, and how much a person can say he knows others to be then shocked by what he didn’t know. There is a lot that this story tells without the need to get into tedious details. I loved it!
“…if something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feelings of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. 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.”
such a loving and tragic story.
As an avid reader, I couldn’t pass up a book called “The Reader”. The importance of reading and the complexities of life are combined in this story. I don’t want to give away anything in this story because the reason the book touched me so much was some turns that I was not expecting.
Such a great insight into the struggles of the time ! I could not put it down and thought about it for days upon finishing it.
Dark but beautifully written.