Book: The Reader
Author: Bernhard Schlink
Published: 1997 (Random House, American edition)
Pages: 218
Lives of quiet desperation that explode into unexpected
directions make for the best stories because they feel the most real. This
story of how a German schoolboy falls in desperate and eventually reciprocal
lust with his middle-aged neighbor, only to fall out of touch with her until
decades later when she’s on trial for a war crime, is so achingly human in its
juxtaposition of the boy’s blunt adolencent emotions against her rigid
self-control, and now I’m making it start to sound like a bondage novel, but there
is something so matter-of-fact about it all that you can’t help but believe it.
Then he grows up and watches her get sentenced to jail
because she can’t read but won’t admit it to the court that convicts her to
life in prison, and he comes to slow terms with the fact that he loved a woman
who could (maybe – it’s never super-clear) do such horrible things, and then he
gets to feel guilty all over again when he starts reading books on tape for her
to listen to in prison and she learns how to write but he never sends her any
notes until she needs someone to help her on the outside when she’s about to
get released.
It’s about growing up and facing change and trying to hold
fast to the good you first saw and loved in people, and it’s in such low-key
language like a piano piece where the melody is set down low in the left hand
that you feel it more than hear it and some deep part of you keeps time until
it ends on a minor note and you’re all, “Damn, that was gorgeous. I think I’m
gonna go wring my heart out now.”
Bookshelf.
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