Different yes, really moving for me it was a no (The Reader - Bernhard Schlink)

Member Name: darren55

Product:	The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
Date:	03/09/09 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: An investigation into a crazy time in Germany

Disadvantages: A one person account is always a tough read

The Reader is a novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink and is nominally a love story about a young boy falling in love with a women in her early thirties. Its set just after the war, and the woman is a bus conductor called Hannah and the boy is called Michael.

This book is told solely from the first person perspective of Michael because of this we have a lot of detail about other things but the boy himself I found a bit of an enigma, we are told very little about his looks or indeed his hopes and fears for the future. However, on the subject of Hanna we are given all the details, her hair, what she looks like, her body shape, her long silky legs and her slightly colourful language.

Michael meets her when he suffers an attack of hepatitis and she helps him home, he then takes flowers around to her flat and then manages to get another meeting with her and they engage in a passionate love affair.

There are greater forces at work here though than a bit of adolescent first conquests, Germany is still torn by the war and though never mentioned overtly the population is thrown between trying to forget and trying to punish those responsible. Hanna appears a well established though lowly member of society, she has rather attached herself to the energetic young man and though we aren't privy to her thoughts, her actions say plenty. Hanna is clearly highly sexed and also sexually liberated, she takes the young man on a sexual adventure which only seems to get more and more wild. However, even here there appear to be caveats, she won't let him have sex with her on her tram late at night and she gets very upset when he disappears one morning when they have stayed over in a small hotel.

Then finally when everything appears settled Hanna finally visits Michaels house when his parents are away, and though you don't know it at the time you feel instinctively that the happy days of youth for the young man are going to change forever and that proves correct when she disappears.

Jump forward a few years and now Michael is a student and seeing that there is going to be a war crimes trial at a nearby town goes along and is shocked when he finds out one of the accused is Hanna. I think this is pretty well known from the blurb on the back and the films release so I don't think I'm giving too much away.

What do I think about the latter scenes? Well I expected to be moved but maybe the films release watered down the shock or I just didn't quite grasp Michael and Hanna's story but the ending didn't really leave me thinking wow thats awesome but more well thats interesting. I then moved onto my next book and didn't really think I must read that again soon.

Maybe I missed something, maybe the style of writing in the first person gave only one side of the story, that of Michaels and we never hear Hanna's side in her true voice or maybe those complex difficult times are too abstract for me in my comfy English twenty first century life to really grasp?

I enjoyed the book don't get me wrong, but did it move me like Animal Farm or Catch22, or indeed Robert Harris's Archangel then the answer would be no.

Summary: Moving but not my favourite book of the last few months