On to the blog...
This is the inaugural (and possibly only, depending on how fun this is) book review that I will post on my blog. As previously stated, I've been reading a ridiculous amount because I nanny for a 4-month old and am living in a strange city. I have a lot of time to obsessively read books.
I'm going to start with the book I finished most recently. It is The Reader by Bernard Schlink. I am a product of modern culture and my iGoogle news feed normally shows me more hollywood news then anything in the literature category, so I heard of the movie version of this story before I had heard of the book.
I began hearing the hype for this movie and have read several good reviews. So I knew I had to read the novel. I always want to read the books and see the movies both. However, the order in which I do these things is very important to the story. If I see the movie first, I get a lot less enjoyment out of the book. It's hard for me to read books when I have a clear picture of the story already in my mind.
If I read the books first, I can still enjoy the movies. I love to see if the moviemakers had the same vision of the story I did or how it differs.
All this to say, when I started seeing previews for the movie and saw that Kate Winslet (love her!) was starring in it, I knew I should pick up the book. So I headed to my neighborhood B&N and picked it up.
Unfortunately, the paperback version with Kate Winslet on the front of it was way cheaper than the non-movie pimping version of the book, so I had to buy it. I always try to buy the one that makes me look like I was cool and read the book before Hollywood realized it was good enough to make into a movie. Impossible in this case.
This was an interesting book for me. It's set in post-Holocaust Germany. It's divided into 2 parts. The entire first part wasn't really doing it for me. His writing was fairly compelling, but I didn't understand the characters at all. I wasn't really loving it.
Then I got to the second part of the book and I was in love. There are two main characters. We see the story through the eyes of Michael Berg, who is a pubescent boy in the first part of the book. He falls in love (and lust) with an older woman named Hanna. Their affair settles into a routine which includes after-school shower, sex and Michael reading aloud to Hanna. He did this to appease her, but didn't understand why she enjoyed hearing the stories he was reading in school and his other favorites.
I didn't understand Hanna in the first part of the book. She was cold and often mean, although she also seemed to actually care about Michael. She seemed typical, slightly weathered and lacking depth.
In the second part of the book, Michael is a law student covering the trial of several female SS guards that let hundreds of women under their supervision die in a fire. One of the defendants is Hanna. He never speaks to her, but he comes to the trial every day. Hanna seems resigned, she takes responsibility for the things she did and disputes accusations that are false. She doesn't seem to have a thought of strategy.
Michael doesn't understand Hanna. Her answers begin to not make sense. The others make her the scapegoat, marking her as the ringleader. She won't dispute it and Michael finally puts all the pieces together to realize why. He discovers that Hanna is illiterate and the pieces of her life begin to fall into place in his head.
This is where the book struck me. Hanna is an unsympathetic character, someone you don't really care about because you don't really understand her. The unveiling of this one secret changes all of that. Her whole life is dictated by trying to hide her one secret. Bernie (that's what I call him) puts it so powerfully when he describes Hanna at her trial:
"She was not pursuing her own interests, but fighting for her own truth, her own justice... It was a pitiful truth and pitiful justice, but it was hers, and the struggle for it was her struggle.
She must have been completely exhausted. Her struggle was not limited to the trial. She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats."
Hanna was convicted based on her own admissions and sent to prison where she died.
I understand Hanna.
How often are our frantic retreats disguised as advances? How often do we struggle to create our own truth, our own justice, no matter how pitiful? The lies that we tell the world truly cripple us.
There were some other interesting passages exploring the collective responsibility of the people of Germany for the Holocaust, how the sins of the parents effect the children. Michael was too young and too rich to be directly effected by the Holocaust, but it was part of his consciousness none the less.
In summary, stick with it. It's worth it. Beautiful characters, quick read. I'm excited to see the movie.
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