If you have any intention of reading the book, ignore this review as it has a big spoiler (though the spoiler is also in the name of the book).
The first part of 'The Reader' reads like an erratic love story between a man (protagonist) and an older woman (Hana).
"I remember that her body and the way she held it and moved sometimes seemed awkward. Not that she was particularly heavy. It was more as if she had withdrawn into her own body, and left it to itself and its own quiet rhythms, unbothered by any input from her mind, oblivious to the outside world. It was the same obliviousness that weighed in her glance and her movements when she was pulling on her stockings. But then she was not awkward, she was slow-flowing, graceful, seductive—a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body."
In the second part, the narrator discovers the woman in trials again ex-Nazis where he finds out that she has served as a guard in Nazi camps. Hana and the narrator were representatives of two generations of Germany - that which actively supported or at least allowed in silence for Nazis to commit crimes against humanity like the holocaust; and the generation that came after and had to live with the guilt of the crime.
"Our parents had played a variety of roles in the Third Reich. Several among our fathers had been in the war, two or three of them as officers of the Wehrmacht and one as an officer of the Waffen SS. Some of them had held positions in the judiciary or local government. Our parents also included teachers and doctors, and one of us had an uncle who had been a high official in the Ministry of the Interior. I am sure that to the extent that we asked and to the extent that they answered us, they had very different stories to tell. My father did not want to talk about himself, but I knew that he had lost his job as a lecturer in philosophy for scheduling a lecture on Spinoza, and had got himself and us through the war as an editor for a house that published hiking maps and books. How did I decide that he too was under a sentence of shame? But I did. We all condemned our parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst."
"Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not have, morally and legally—for my generation of students it was a lived reality. It did not just apply to what had happened in the Third Reich. The fact that Jewish gravestones were being defaced with swastikas, that so many old Nazis had made careers in the courts, the administration, and the universities, that the Federal Republic did not recognize the State of Israel for many years, that emigration and resistance were handed down as traditions less often than a life of conformity—all this filled us with shame, even when we could point at the guilty parties. Pointing at the guilty parties did not free us from shame, but at least it overcame the suffering we went through on account of it. It converted the passive suffering of shame into energy, activity, aggression."
Hana has actively helped in Nazi crimes. At her trials, she is honest about her actions and gets punished too for them (even more than she would have received if everything was known).
What I personally liked about this book is the theme of the reader in Hana. The big spoiler is that she is illiterate and had spent almost all her life hiding it - even choosing to get accused of crimes against humanity and being punished for same instead of letting it out she can't read. Hanna guards this secret well against the narrator when he was her lover and the whole world.
Though she can not read, she is a reader. She loves books, and probably first developed her passion for them when the narrator would read them to her. And keeping up with it as a guard where she would have one of the girls read it to her. Later, when she turns her life sentence into severe repentance, the narrator starts sending audio recordings of his reading book. That's when she taught herself how to read and write with help of recordings and books from the library.
There are some people, it seems to me, who can only be happy in stories. These days there are alternatives in moves and TV series but I have often wondered what it would be like for such a person to be illiterate like a century ago when the stories would be out of their reach. Hanna is a personification of that anguish- that an illiterate person can feel when they realize the kind of experience reading can offer.
When she learns to read, Hanna reads only about Nazi history - accounts of survivors and guards. Even that is discovered only after her death as Hana lets very little of what she thinks or feels out. She is only known and interpreted through her actions - even by the narrator who probably had the closest relationship. She called the narrator 'kid' even when she has sex with him or when he is a middle-aged man. She rarely talks about her feelings.
You only know her through her interactions with the world and they show a person who is capable of empathy toward the weak but could not quit her job when she found that she was a part of genocide.
There is a lot more to talk about- I didn't even talk about the narrator. That's just the thing with five-star books, you either end up wordless or have too much to talk about. In more clinical terms, I liked the character building of Hanna, her desperation for illiteracy, and the reader-listener relationship with the narrator.
Comments
Post a Comment