Michael Berg was walking down the street and began to feel ill and vomits on the street. A woman sees this and cleans him up and helps him home. After being diagnosed with hepatitis and being bed-ridden for a month, this woman is in his thoughts constantly, and when he feels better he decides to visit to thank this woman for her kindness. A romance soon blossoms between the two of them. This sounds like an average beginning for most love stories; boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl and everything ends as a happily ever after fantasy. There is a slight twist on the classic perception of what a love story should be, Michael is a fifteen year old boy and Hanna is a woman twice his age. This is the opening plot of the latest novel by Bernhard Schlink. The Reader was originally published in German and was translated to English by Carol Brown Janeway.

The Reader definitely drifts from the average love story between a man and a woman. The relationship between Michael and Hanna is a passionate yet mentally stimulating courtship. Hanna and Michael's meetings that include Michael reading to Hanna out loud, bicycling through the woods and long talks, become more frequent. Michael really believes that he is in love with Hanna even though he really does not know much about her. The long talks the two would have were about Michael's hopes and dreams, if the discussion lingered on Hanna too long she found ways to change the subject. After a misunderstanding between the two, Hanna disappears and Michael is devastated, feeling guilty and depressed.

Many years later Michael is studying law at a university, and he is part of a seminar group attending a few of the post Nazi crime trials. He is in dismay when he discovers that Hanna is on trial along with a group of former concentration camp guards. It becomes clear to Michael that she is guilty of something far different other than the murders that were committed in the concentration camp. She is hiding something she considers to be more shameful, but this secret could save her from going to prison but she chooses to keep her secret.

Michael is void of all emotion after all that he has witnessed and then he discovers a way to move on. While suffering through bouts of insomnia he begins to read and record his favorite books on tape and send them to Hanna in prison, and the bond between the two is rekindled. The bond the two share is continued until Hanna's release from prison, and the anguishing end of this novel leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied.

There are many questions the reader may ask themselves while engrossed in this cleverly written novel by Bernhard Schlink. The question that I asked myself was, "How could a woman become involved with a young boy fifteen years her junior?" Wasn't there just a case in the news recently regarding an older woman being involved with her student? In this novel however, Bernhard Schlink makes the reader feel for these characters and the turmoil the two go through in order to be together.

Sigmund Freud would have been in his glory regarding the depths Schlink took in writing this novel. The psychological complexity persuades the reader to think about a subject matter that is usually considered to be taboo to discuss. The Oedipus Complex comes to mind when reading this story. The subject of a young boy having a sexual relationship with a woman twice his age causes many mixed emotions while reading. On one hand you know that it is wrong for the two of them being involved, on the other hand you are intrigued by the measures they took to be with one another. If the roles were reversed and Michael was the one who was older and Hanna was fifteen years old, would we still have the same moral question rolling around in our minds as we read this novel? That depends on how the reader interprets the story between the two characters.

Schlink brilliantly delivers this novel in way that leaves the reader wanting to know more. The ending leaves the mind open to fantasize how we want the novel to end and to comprehend the point that Schlink was implying. In the end we are questioning our own moral stance on the subject, but the only conclusion you are left with is this, The Reader is a love story with a twist that leaves the mind wanting more of these characters. In the end, regardless of the moral questions we may ask, this novel it still engages the reader's emotions in a brilliant manner striking the heart and mind in ways that no other novel will. The vivid detail that Schlink includes in this novel is key to understanding the whole novel, without his resplendent imagination, the novel would have paled in comparison to what it is now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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