Thoughts On: ‘The Reader’
March 14th, 2010
Picking up The Reader I didn’t have a massive idea of what it was about, I knew it was set around a romance but I didn’t really know much more than that. I certainly didn’t expect what it to be what it was either, what a wonderful surprise. As a lover of history and trying to understand things that don’t always make sense this book touched on feelings I have often found myself pondering. I don’t know much about the history of German or WWII particularly well (I stopped studying it at 16), but to my surprise that really didn’t seem to matter. The Reader is poignant and heart wrenching, I adored it, I read it in one sitting, I couldn’t let myself put it down.
“The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading and shame in post-war Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany’s Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: what should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? “We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable… Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?”"
- Amazon.co.uk
