Μια συγκλονιστική ιστορία ενηλικίωσης μέσα από μια ερωτική σχέση με φόντο τη ναζιστική γερμανία. Με μια ήρεμη δύναμη η αφήγηση απογειώνει το συναίσθημα. Κλείνω την αναγνωστική χρονιά μου με ένα ίσως από τα καλύτερα βιβλία που έχω διαβάσει!

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink is a sparsely written novel that still has great storytelling power. I haven't read a lot of Holocaust fiction, although it is an area that I am (perhaps morbidly) interested in, so of course this book appealed. I had previously seen the film, but it was several years ago so my memory of certain plot points was a little fuzzy. However, this book is so brilliantly told and paced that I was immediately brought back into the world and time period.

The book is a parable, narrated by Michael Berg, who now in his adult years reflects on his relationship as a 15 year old with a 36 year old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz. This relationship shaped his personality and his tastes for years to come, even into adulthood, and is brought to a head once again when as a young law student, he finds that Hanna is on trial for her work as an SS guard at Auschwitz during the war.

The chapters are short but don't feel snappy and don't speed up the pace. Rather, Schlink does not need overly flowery language or pages and pages to tell his story, instead presenting the bare bones of everything. I loved this simplistic style, as not only was it incredibly easy to read but it also helped communicate some of the numbness that Michael Berg felt over the years, particularly in the court room scene. As a law professional, both Berg (and the author) had a very clear cut way of dealing with things which I really enjoyed.

There is a lot of philosophical and reflective content in this book, and deals a great deal with the guilt that young Germans felt in the aftermath of a war that their parents were involved with, either for good or for bad. The book dealt with the feeling of shame that many people at the time felt, and how they dealt with it (or didn't deal with it). This book would benefit from a re-read at some point to properly engage with the content that is a little more apart from the central plot.

I would highly recommend this book if you want a simple but arresting read, or are a fan of WW2 themed fiction. I would also highly recommend the movie afterwards!

This book will haunt you and never leave you alone. Fantastic read. One of my alltime favourites. There is also a movie with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes I can also recommend. Absolutely spellbinding.

Der Vorleser = The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

The Reader is a novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink, published in Germany in 1995.

The story is told in three parts by the main character, Michael Berg. Each part takes place in a different time period in the past.

Spoiler Alert

Part I begins in a West German city in 1958. After 15-year-old Michael becomes ill on his way home, 36-year-old tram conductor Hanna Schmitz notices him, cleans him up, and sees him safely home. He spends the next three months absent from school battling hepatitis. ...

Part 2, Six years later, while attending law school, Michael is part of a group of students observing a war crimes trial. A group of middle-aged women who had served as SS guards at a satellite of Auschwitz in occupied Poland are being tried for allowing 300 Jewish women under their ostensible "protection" to die in a fire locked in a church that had been bombed during the evacuation of the camp. The incident was chronicled in a book written by one of the few survivors, who emigrated to the United States after the war; she is the main prosecution witness at the trial. ...

Part 3, Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter from his brief marriage. He is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna, and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison.

Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text.

She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison.

On the day of her release in 1983, she commits suicide and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps.

The warden, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire.

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «برايم كتاب بخوان»؛ «کتابخوان»؛ نویسنده: برنهارد شلینک؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز نوزدهم ماه فوریه سال2004میلادی

عنوان: برايم كتاب بخوان؛ نویسنده: برنهارد شلینک؛ مترجم بهمندخت اویسی؛ تهران، نشر فرزان، 1381؛ در سیزده و 239ص؛ شابک9643211703؛ چاپ دیگر با عنوان کتابخوان؛ تهران، نشر تاریخ ایران، 1388، در 204ص؛ شابک 9789646082755؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان آلمان - سده 20م

داستان در سال 1958میلادی در آلمان آغاز می‌شود؛ «میشائیل»، نوجوان پانزده ساله، بطور اتفاقی، با زنی به نام «هانا»، آشنا و به او علاقمند می‌شود؛ «هانا» هر بار که «میشائیل» نزد او می‌رود، او را وادار می‌کند، تا برایش با صدای بلند کتاب بخواند؛ «میشائیل» روزی متوجه می‌شود، که «هانا» بدون آنکه نشانی از خود برجای بگذارد، شهر را ترک کرده است؛ سال‌ها می‌گذرد، و «میشائیل» بزرگ می‌شود؛ او در رشته ‌ی حقوق تحصیل می‌کند، و روزی، در یکی از دادگاه‌ هایی که برای مجازات جنایتکاران جنگ جهانی دوم برپا ‌شده، «هانا» را می‌یابد؛ «هانا» در جایگاه متهمان قرار گرفته، و شواهد بر این دلالت دارند، که او در زمان جنگ، نگهبان زندانیانی بوده است، که به شکل وحشیانه ‌ای قتل‌عام شده ‌اند …؛ با اقتباس از این داستان فیلمی نیز به همین نام ساخته شده است؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 18/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 28/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

What About the Children?

The Reader is a profound exposition of the 'second generation' issues concerning moral guilt for the Holocaust. But it is, I think, also relevant more generally to the way in which human beings get ensnared incrementally into the evils of their society. We are all inevitably involved in this larger problem. And, like the SS guards at a Nazi death camp, we are unaware of the moral peril of our situation, and unwilling to remove ourselves from that situation even when its harmful effects are obvious.

To be more personal and concrete: At the moment I have three acquaintances, each of whom has had a reasonably successful corporate career - one as an investment manager in the City, the second as a senior executive of an international sporting organisation, and the third as a partner of a global accounting firm. All three are, however, deeply dissatisfied with their lives.

Their marriages, they all feel, are on the edge of breakdown. One has had a psychological breakdown and is now institutionalised. Another has been made redundant and, despite a large payout, sees nothing but existential gloom for the rest of his days. The last is disgusted with the complete indifference of both his colleagues and clients to the visible harm their firms are inflicting on the world. All of them, it shouldn't be necessary to emphasise, 'volunteered' for the careers and styles of living they now suffer from.

A central question posed to The Reader's defendant in her trial for causing the death of Jewish prisoners trapped in a burning church is, "Why didn't you unlock the door?" I posed essentially the same question to my three acquaintances: "The situation you now find yourself in did not occur overnight." I gently suggested, "Therefore as you perceived what was happening to your mind, to your family, to the quality of your life, to national culture, why didn't you stop?" In principle, stopping is even less difficult than unlocking a door.

The reasons given for not stopping were almost identical in all three cases: "I can't afford to." The financial denotation of 'afford', however, wasn't the main point. Guilt in not providing what their families needed was important. Financial compensation had become just that - compensation for the companionship of marriage and family that had been denied. This was associated with a fear of the disappointment or disapproval by their friends and family. Success is naturally a social matter defined for us by those we know well. But upon pushing a bit harder, it was also clear that the common strand among them was that each believed he had somehow let himself down by not realising the full potential he believed he had in him.

This psychic driver of "being the best you can" struck loud bells in my own experience. It also reminded me of the remarkable book by Karen Ho, a social researcher from Princeton. Her ethnographic study of the life and culture of Wall Street, Liquidated, is as insightful as it is troublesome to anyone who asks themselves why indeed they have not simply unlocked the door to an alternative life. As she discovered in her employment in an investment bank, the culture of professional firms like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company is grounded in a simple, direct message: "You are here (or want to be here in the case of applicants) because you are the best and want to be among the best." Call it the Culture of Presumptive Excellence (CPE) for short.

CPE is what stimulates people to work consistently impossible hours, in places distant from home, with no respite. It also justifies the treatment of subordinates as corporate fodder, hiring and firing with panache, and insisting on single-minded loyalty as one moves up the ranks. Standards of excellence, after all, do not maintain themselves. In my experience, CPE, not compensation, or excitement, or 'perks', is the motive force of not just Wall Street but of the entire global corporate world. Escaping that world is no easier than escaping the totalitarian society of Nazi Germany. The identity and the obligations of 'being the best' is a very powerful lock indeed, without any obvious key.

Of course CPE is not merely a corporate problem; it is a societal problem. It is a problem of the perceived order. Schlink's war-trial defendant, Hanna, did not unlock the doors of the church to let the prisoners out, not because she is evil or because she was following orders. She was afraid, she says, of the disorder that would have ensued: prisoners running amok without the proper supervision to get them back in marching line.

It is this same disorder that my three acquaintances seem to fear most. The problem with being 'the best' is that the criterion for being best has to be set by someone with authority. The self-identity of the best depends on this. To reject this classification and the criteria that define it, one also must reject the authority that sanctioned it. This authority is so diffuse throughout society, that to reject it means to reject the entire society. The loss of both identity and context for establishing a new identity is the ultimate disorder, chaos.

Jean Korelitz, for example, herself a former admissions officer for Princeton, shows how pervasive the CPE is in the steps before entering the corporate world in her novel, Admission. Princeton's 'pitch' to applicants is exactly the same as that of the Wall Street firms to its applicants: "As the best, you will want to stay among the best, so apply to Princeton." The stage before this, entry into prep school, is also fictionalised from experience, in turn, by Louis Auchincloss, particularly in his novel, The Rector of Justin. The message doesn't vary: "We are the best and will help you stay among the best."

The destruction of personalities, families, and culture by CPE is systematic. And it is systematically defended even by those whom it excludes. The effects of CPE extend beyond those who are certifiably, as it were, the best to those who aspire to become part of the elite. Deficiencies are masked by the aspiration itself, which is merely the acceptance of the defining authority.

In The Reader, Hanna is able to hide her secret shame by joining the SS, an elite corps. I can say with a moral certainty that all three of my acquaintances have what are, to them, equivalent to Hanna's secret deficiencies. Fear of exposure is therefore a powerful motivation to keep the system going, to promote its stable orderliness even when it is so evidently destructive.

Schlink's narrator, Michael Berg, knows that Hanna could not have committed the crimes she is accused of because of the secret she is unwilling to reveal. She may be guilty but not as guilty as she appears, or of what she is charged with. What duty does he have to unlock the door with which she has imprisoned herself? To speak up, either to her or the court, would expose her to profound shame, greater shame even than that of being found guilty of war crimes perhaps. And if he does decide to speak up, how should he do it - to her? To her lawyer? To the judge? I feel the same dilemmas in advising my acquaintances, knowing that any mis-step could provoke yet more consternation as well as a pointed lack of gratitude for my solicited but still impertinent advice.

Berg's father, a philosopher, advises a simple ethical rule: don't try to second guess the criterion of the good that an individual has established for himself. This is useless advice. It simply anoints conformity as the ethical norm. Conformity is the opposite of resistance, a capacity for which is essential to avoid personal co-optation, to either totalitarianism or corporatism. Resistance which can take many forms. All of them dangerous because they challenge order and the power behind order. And all demand apparently un-virtuous behaviour. How can one advise such a course to anyone one cares about? Ultimately Berg fails to act at all.

I find myself in Berg's position. I feel any advice I can give is vapid. To suggest resistance against a corporate culture that is so pervasive and so domineering is madness. I can only ask the question "Best is the superlative for what?" But I can't answer the question. I am as trapped as anyone else. Will the children of my acquaintances, or my own, look at the lives of their parents with the same dismay as the so-called second generation of German children perceived their parents after 1945?

Schlink's story ends in tragic sadness and unresolved guilt. Perhaps no other ending is possible.

Hace unos días una compañera de GR me recomendó esta lectura, y no dudé ni un segundo en ir a la biblioteca para ver si tenían este libro. Es más, como sé que más o menos nos gustan las mismas lecturas, ni tan siquiera perdí el tiempo en leer la sinopsis. ¿Para qué lo iba hacer? Además, ¿no es más interesante abrir un libro sin saber lo que te vas a encontrar en su interior? ¿Dejarte llevar hacia donde él quiera conducirte? Pues bien, he de decir que esta lectura me ha gustado y sorprendido a partes iguales: he disfrutado con el amor de Michael por Hanna, y cuestionado el pasado de ella. Y al final, supongo, los he perdonado y entendido a los dos.

«اگه تو جای من بودی چکار می‌کردی؟»

این جمله تنها دلیلیه که این کتاب به یادم می‌مونه

داستان از جایی شروع میشه که مایکلِ پانزده ساله در خیابان مریض میشه و زنی بهش کمک می‌کنه. بعدها رابطه‌‌ای بین این دو شکل میگیره که بعضی‌ها اسمش رو عشق می‌گذارند، ولی به نظر من فقط اروتیکه‌. زن بزرگ‌تری که از پسر کم سنی سواستفاده جنسی می‌کنه. اما داستان اصلی سال‌ها بعد از این رابطه اتفاق میوفته، وقتی مایکل راجع به گذشته‌ی هانا می‌فهمه

قلم نویسنده به معنای واقعی کلمه خشک و یکنواخته. هیچکدام از کاراکترها برای من جان نگرفتند و اهمیت پیدا نکردند. زمان در کتاب سریع جلو می‌رفت، اما من بزرگ‌شدن پسر و پیر شدن هانا رو حس نمی‌کردم. از همه بدتر مکانیکی نوشته شدن احساسات و صحنه‌های اروتیک بود که من رو از داستان خیلی دور نگه داشت

برعکس کتاب، در فیلم اقتباسی تمام این ضعف‌ها جبران شده بود و کیت وینسلت شخصیت هانا رو برای من زنده کرد. تمام احساسات، گذر زمان و تلخی داستان به بهترین شکل تصویر شده و این داستان بی‌روح انگار زنده شده بود

اما دلیلی که این کتاب به یک کلاسیک تبدیل شده تابو شکنیه. اول رابطه‌ی نامتعارف مایکل و هانا و از اون مهم‌تر نگاه نویسنده به زمان حساسِ پس از جنگ‌ جهانی دوم در آلمان. زمانی که آلمانی‌ها باید با آنچه انجام داده بودند رو به رو می‌شدند و حتی برای سکوتشون شماتت می‌شدند. زمانی که سوال‌های بزرگی در مورد درست و غلط مطرح شد. چطور باید نازی‌ها رو محاکمه کنیم؟ کسی که در اون زمان در چهارچوب قانون عمل کرده رو می‌تونیم با قوانین الان محاکمه کنیم؟

فرض کنید قانون الان کشتن فردی رو مجاز می‌دونه و تو در جایگاهی قرار داری که باید این کار رو بکنی. اگر فردا قانون عوض بشه و همه به این نتیجه برسند که اون قتل توجیهی نداره، آیا تو قاتلی یا فقط در چهارچوب قانون عمل کردی؟ آیا باید خودت می‌فهمیدی که این‌کار اشتباهه؟ بر چه اساسی؟ این سوالاتیه که هربار پس از یک تغییر اساسی در هر سیستمی پیش میاد و اصولاً جوابش رو ساده می‌کنند: گیوتین، اعدام، حبس ابد

الان واقعا دارم فکر می‌کنم که اگر من بودم چکار می‌کردم؟

M's Books : کتاب و صوتیش رو هم اینجا گذاشتم
۱۴۰۰/۷/۲۰

It's too simple to say I read any single book because I want to read it. There are dozens of reasons I'll pick up a particular title: I like the author; I like the subject matter; the book is an award winner; the book comes with many trusted recommendations; I was supposed to read the book in high school and I feel guilty because I played Goldeneye on my N64 instead. I will freely admit that I read War and Peace simply to say I read War and Peace. I'd take it to the cafeteria every day and let people see me with it. I was trying to project a certain image; unfortunately, the image I projected was a creepy loner way too interested in Russian melodrama.

I read The Reader because it had Nazis. And because it prominently featured a deviant sexual affair. Sold and sold.

I dared think that Bernhard Schlink's novel might be that rarest of things, these days: truly transgressive. I mean, sex and Nazis and a literary pedigree to boot. Where do I sign up?

This slim novel tells the story of an affair between 15 year-old Michael and the far-older Hanna, with whom he has an affair in West Germany in 1958. Hanna, a tram conductor, comes to Michael's aid when Michael falls ills. Later, Michael's mother forces Michael to go thank Hanna; after a laughably stupid seduction (the literary equivalent of that old porn standby, the copy repairman), the two are having an affair.

I guess this is shocking? Taboo busting? I don't know. I can't really muster much moral outrage at statutory rape when it is set against the recent background of the Holocaust. Moreover, the scenes between the two "lovers" (how I despise that phrase!) are written in such a mundane, clinical fashion, that I could only speculate that Schlink (or his translator) was a technical writer, taking time off from telling me the side effects of Ditropan. (In reality, Schlink is a judge, and I suppose the detached, just-the-facts-ness of The Reader could be compared to a legal brief).

The affair goes on for awhile. It doesn't generate much heat, since both the main characters are constructed out of cardboard, with macaroni faces and yarn for hair. The title is also explained - partially - because Michael must read aloud to Hanna before they Biblically unite. That sound you hear is my eyes rolling.

Eventually, Hanna disappears. Seven years later, Michael is a law student, and he attends a war crimes trial where - SHOCK! - Hanna is on trial. Turns out she was a concentration camp guard: think Mary Kay Letourneau crossed with Heinrich Himmler.

It's hard to screw up a novel about a Nazi pedophile, but it happens here.

There is always going to be tension when a fictional work of art (using that term loosely) is set against the backdrop of a recent tragedy. Until the last person who survived said tragedy is dead, any author daring to touch the subject is going to get dinged a little. We can all argue about the morality of such fictionalizations, but the point is moot. It's going to happen.

Schlink obviously knew the dangers going in, and tried to avoid them. In doing so, he wrote a book that is simply flat. There are two directions to take a story like this. First, there is over-the-top, Inglorious Basterds-style pulp. Just accept that your book is basically fan-fiction from the SS Experiment Camp line of movies, and wait for Cinemax to call with an offer. The second direction is to make a serious, searching novel about an ordinary person who survived the Holocaust, but as a cog in the machinery of death, rather than a survivor. Explore how that person lives each day wtih the things he or she has done. This kind of book would take a lot of psychological digging, and there aren't a lot of authors up to this task.

The Reader tries to do a little of both, and ends up a big, dull, intellecutally-insulting dud. As already noted, the love affair generates slightly less heat than the pairing of Liza Minnelli and David Gest. The decision to include a statutorily illegal relationship was obviously meant to garner attention, but it fails to shock, titilate, or even vaguely incite any interest.

The transition to the courtroom, and beyond, is even worse. Here, the author makes a half-hearted attempt to avoid moral relativism, and then falls right into that trap. In an epic bit of reductionism, Schlink manages to equate the tragedy of the Holocaust with - spoiler alert, I guess - adult illiteracy. If only that was a joke.

Schlink's idea of depth is to fill a couple of pages with facile hypothetical questions that he helpfully leaves unanswered. All the better; I doubt I would care about what answers he discovered.

While Part I of The Reader is a tepid affair between two paper dolls, and Part II reduces the Holocaust to one SS Guard's illiterate shame, Part III manages, stunningly, to get worse. The epilogue, which must be read to be believed, is so stilted, awkward, and glib that I almost felt bad for the characters/ciphers forced to utter the tortured dialogue.

I suppose I got what I deserved. It's like when you click on a hyperlink for naked celebrity photos and get a computer virus instead. (Or so I've been told...) I picked up this book thinking it might be trashy, and it turned out it was, but just not the kind of trash I enjoy.

The concept of love never ceases to amaze. From the cradle to the grave, a human being is guided,driven, motivated or annihilated because of it. Even when the presence of this feeling is what makes life tick for all humanity, we tend to call the romantic variant as 'falling in' love. This has always seemed ironical to me for if this feeling was as spiritually uplifting as it is believed to be, why don't we call it 'rising in' love ?

Ah ! But I digress from the point here ! This book is fuelled by an affair. The love contained in the plot made me plod through the dusty attic of my mind from where the lines above clattered out. The plot centers around the affair of a younger man with an older woman. An affair ruled only by sex and sex alone. During the adolescent phase, the thoughts of love are always entwined with lust in the mind. Like copulating serpents they lie and it is a futile task trying to make out where one ends and the other begins. The journey of Michael Berg through the curves of Hanna Schmitz's anatomy is also one of self discovery for him. In the loss of innocence lies the keys to his future and he is at the verge of getting to those keys when the short and stormy affair blows out. The pain of withdrawal while at first unbearable, slowly becomes a dull ache. With the passage of years there comes a clinical detachment while seeing the ones we loved and lost long ago. The beauty of the language can be acutely felt when the author describes that memories of long ago stay behind like a city as a train pulls out of a station. The memories are there, behind you but in the passage of the train they disappear behind a bend in the track.

The story changes lanes here and does a total flip and from a loved-and-lost tale, it becomes an intricately plotted tale of human morality and guilt. In a particular passage which depicts a court scene, I was reminded of a couple of lines from a Steig Larsson book There are no innocents, only varying levels of guilt . Through those court room scenes we are asked the fundamental questions about morals and principles, about guilt and remorse, of crime and punishment and other such things.While you are made fully aware that the accused while not being fully innocent does not deserve what comes to them.

To sum it all up, this is an extremely tragic tale. The love in here is like the strong gust of wind that threatens to uproot us while standing on a ledge.For the characters in here though, the wind becomes a little too strong to bear !

Recommended.

n  Betraying not to betrayn

In Germany, many years after the World War II, those who had been too young to take an active part in the Nazi period were called “the lucky-late born”. But what is it so lucky in suspecting, openly accusing or ashamedly hiding the crimes of your parents, relatives, older friends? How did an entire “late-born” generation deal with this feeling of shame and betrayal intertwined with love? How did they cope?

They did not, Bernard Schlink tells us in his novel The Reader, because they could not. Every memory of every gesture and every word of love became eventually tarnished by a past that forever shadowed them, stealing their ingenuity and their joy:

Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.

Moreover, dreadful disclosures tend to superpose happy memories, corrupting them with the suspicion of potential dangers, thus doubting the very essence of love. This was the tragedy of a generation. This is the tragedy of the narrator, Michael Berg, when he discovers his former lover Hanna Schmitz, who disappeared without a word many years ago, in a courtroom among other defendants accused of war crimes:

Would she have sent me to the gas chamber if she hadn’t been able to leave me, but wanted to get rid of me?

It is not accidental that there are many insurmountable gaps between the two lovers: of age (she is thirty-six to his fifteen), of education (he is a student she will be proven illiterate), of mentality, of emotional and physical intensity, gaps that will add to the awful discovery to confuse and hurt the narrator into re-writing his past while becoming resigned that this past will shape his future under the inescapable sign of guilt and betrayal:

…if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal.

It is the guilt of all German sons, brothers and friends in this guilt of a lover who tries to make sense of a senseless past that robbed him of his life. Michael tries to ease it by a cathartic gesture, that revives an old ritual of their former relationship: he records himself reading and send the tapes in prison to Hanna, both because he guessed she cannot read and as a way of remembering their happy days together. But even this memory is somehow stained by the ambiguous uncovering during the process that she used to choose young, frail girls to read to her for a month or so before sending them to Auschwitz to die.

It is his way to compromise with his past, to accept the unacceptable until he finally can resign to go on with his life:

In the first years after Hanna’s death, I was tormented by the old question of whether I owed her something, whether I was guilty of having loved her. Sometimes I asked myself if I was responsible for her death. And sometimes I was in a rage at her and at what she had done to me. Until finally the rage faded and the questions ceased to matter. Whatever I had done or not done, whatever she had done or not to me – it was the path my life had taken.

The final question Schlink’s novel seems to ask concerns the extent of the bystander’s guilt. Could Michael have redeemed Hanna and thus free himself? Did he betray himself by betraying her? Is there a way for this crippled generation to forget the horrors of the beloved past without denying them? Is there a path towards forgiveness?

And it comes into my mind a discussion on the same subject in the John Fowles’ Magus, which could also explain why the obvious answer to this question is negative:
"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self." (…)
"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good."

Before saying anything else,let me say I loved the writing style.

Though i didn't like the 1st part (romance and all that)
In fact I regretted
what I have started
Why I have longed this to read?
But I remain patient & keep on reading and with every passing chapter it gets better.
Part 2 was good
& part 3 was brilliant
From Ch 10 to onwards of part 3, every page was remarkable,
break my heart

Більше дописів та інфи в моєму авторському блозі - "Ласкаво просимо в Касл-Рок, штат Мен"

"Читець" Бернгарда Шлінка - це така книга, після якої важко на душі. Сказати нічого. Слів не вистачає.

Але яка ж ця історія влучна - потрапила мені в саме серце.

Вже з перших сторінок події, що відбуваються, виглядають дивними, неправильними. І я це все прекрасно розумію, але відлипнути від сторінок не можу.

Кохання підлітка та дорослої жінки - це розбещення, злочин, кримінальна стаття і термін у в'язниці. Але що робити, якщо воно справжнє? Я не знаю.

Автор розділив книгу на три частини. І вони цілком і повністю різні.

Перша просякнута щирою закоханістю юнака до дорослої жінки, про яку він нічогісінького не знає. Тут все легко і просто, але не завжди. Часом всьо аж надто інтимно, по живому. Відчувається, що попереду буде важче.

Друга частина - вже значно глобальніша і складніша. Тут на перший план приходить проблема власного вибору, правди та брехні. Напруга в німецькому суспільстві початку 60-тих тут влучно передана лише на прикладі одного судового засідання. Я взагалі не уявляю, як німцям вдалось пережити цей розкол, пропрацювати його та переродитись, як нація.

Третя частина - це апогей усього, що відбулось раніше. Кінцівка просто розірвала мене - я не очікував такого повороту. В моїй голові була цілком інша картина, але автор зумів мене здивувати і настільки, що я просто на хвилину завис лише після одного речення.

Малесенький недолік - олдскульний переклад. Ну прям дуже кидається в очі, бо сучасні перекладачі так не працюють.

Знаю, що існує екранізація роману. Я радий, що вона мені не трапилась до прочитання першоджерела.

"Читець" Бернгарда Шлінка - однозначно must-to-read, таких емоцій від тексту я вже давненько не отримував.