The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink

I was looking at this at the library the other day, thinking about what a shame it was that I would never read it because I had never heard of it, and because even though it looked interesting I never have time to read fiction that hasn't come to me highly recommended anymore, so I left it behind, regretfully, along with all the other thousands of books I'll probably never get around to reading, a fact to which I'm gradually becoming reconciled, which is itself a sign of my growing acceptance of my own mortality, which is in turn a sign that I'm no longer in the first flower of youth, so to speak, or to put it more bluntly, I'm getting old. Not that I have a problem with that. Anyway.

I went home after work and cozied up with the back issue of Granta I'd been hoarding, and there, lo and behold, in the midst of an article on 'Fragments' by the mysterious Binjamin Wilkomirski/Bruno Dossekker, was a passing reference to 'The Reader', which was enough for me.

It's a nice, lucid, soft-spoken little book, only about two hundred pages long, I read most of it in an afternoon. According to the Granta article, the lucidity might well be due in part to the translator, Carol Brown Janeway, who also did 'Fragments', but either way it's pleasant to read such heavy material laid out so neatly and thoughtfully. Look how meticulously and elegantly the narrator sums up the central problem of the book - the problem of how to think about a monstrosity:

"I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna's crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks - understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both."

In fact, 'The Reader' reminded me in some ways of one of my favourite books, 'A Quiet Life' by Kenzaburo Oe. It has the same quiet, simple, explicit language, the same inwardness, the same sense that the author is an invisible ghost just barely detectable as the faintest shadow of the infinitely more real narrator - who, in turn, is a sort of shadow of another character. Both books have the same intense focus - crystal clear on the central object, fading to blurry and impressionistic in the background and around the edges, like a picture taken with a pinhole camera (the cover photo of 'The Reader' appears, in fact, to have been taken with a pinhole camera) (come to think of it, so might the cover photo of 'A Quiet Life', although I can't check because I gave it back to my brother). In both cases, the object of that focus (not in the cover photo, but in the story) is another person who, deliberately or not, has utterly changed the course of the narrator's life, such that the narrator's whole identity can only be really understood in terms of the relationship to the central character. Schlink's book makes you think deep thoughts about the Holocaust and the nature of evil, or at least thinks them with you, or for you. Oe's book makes you think deep thoughts about the nature of fame and ambition, and the blurry lines between fiction and reality - it's written from the point of view of his own daughter, or at least the daughter of a famous Japanese writer identified as K. So it's all postmodern and shit, but in a good way.

Anyway. Yammer yammer yammer. Read the book, it's better than the annoyingly "poetic" short story by Jayne Anne Phillips at the end of the Summer 1999 edition of Granta.