I broke a new personal record - 2 books in 2 weeks! Sure, that's what I was supposed to be doing this whole time and was failing to accomplish, but you gotta start somewhere, right?
I saw The Reader before I read the book. It was a good year for Kate Winslet with The Reader and Revolutionary Road. Actually, Revolutionary Road was based on a book by Yates, so maybe I'll read that also.
So, anyway...
I saw The Reader on DVD, and I really enjoyed it, so I decided to read the book. It definitely was not what I expected. The content was all the same, but the style of writing was definitely surprising. The movie was so powerful, it was filled with emotion and seemed complicated. I expected a very long, lofty novel filled with windy, complicated language, images, examples, everything. This book was short and to the point. The language was terse and the tone was matter-of-fact.
Despite it's simplicity in language, it is a very deep and I'd say heavy novel as it brings forth a number of moral dilemmas. In the process it makes you think, it makes you wonder, it makes you question, and it leaves you unsure. In short, it is a very thought provoking novel. On sinning, for example, the protagonist recognizes that if the thought is just as bad as the act itself, then he might as well act on the sin. Or, on happiness, the narrator recognizes that in a happy marriage of let's say 20 years the spouse will revoke the 20 years as happy upon finding out that the partner had a lover throughout the entire 20 years, but you really were happy that whole time, weren't you?
The Reader tells the story of a 15-year-old German boy named Michael Berg who meets a woman, Hanna, who is twice his age and his lover. Michael grows deeply in love with Hanna spending every moment possible with her in her apartment making love. One day, Hanna asks Michael to read aloud to her, and that immediately becomes their ritual: Michael reads aloud to her and then they have sex. We soon realize that Hanna is illiterate, hence the beauty of the ritual, but Michael doesn't put two and two together. One day Hanna vanishes without a word leaving the naive boy depressed and destroyed. They meet again eight years later. This time Michael is a law student and Hanna is on trial for war crimes. We discover Hanna's brutal past in Nazi Germany and are faced with a moral dilemma. Really, Michael is faced with the dilemma, but it makes you wonder. Michael has information that could at the very least reduce Hanna's sentence. Is Hanna not-guilty with this information, or is she still guilty, but just not as guilty? She's brutal, yes, but maybe not as brutal as the rest. Was she just following orders? Could she have done something? Was she acting on her own free will? All of this ties in with the German war guilt in post-war Germany - I love you dad, but you were a mass murderer. I love you mom, but you exterminated Jews on a regular basis - that sort of thing.
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