This is the psychological hub of the novel the man, who can only wonder at the boy’s past, his sin and deception carried out in an almost sleepwalking state, comes to comprehend Hanna’s naïve but straightforward actions, because, strangely but obviously, they mirror his own.
He must do this to try to understand his own actions and to reconcile the memory of the woman he "knew" then with the woman he later learns had been a Nazi concentration camp guard. The first person narrator sets out to tell his own story, going back to the time when he was a schoolboy aged fifteen, to unravel the mystery of the unthinkable, certainly unspeakable, clandestine love affair with a woman old enough to be his mother. But here, the reader knows who ‘dunnit’ right from the very beginning. There are even relics of the detective novel structure in Der Vorleser, an attempt at a reconstruction of the crime. Schlink develops this theme further in Der Vorleser, masterfully weaving autobiographical strands of a young person’s post-war Germany into a strong narrative of forbidden adolescent sexual awakening against a backdrop of a re-emerging nation, struggling to come to terms with economic, social and ethical issues in the hope of earning a place on the world stage.
IMPORTANT QUOTES FROM THE READER BY BERNHARD SCHLINK SERIES
A professor of law at the Universities of Bonn, Frankfurt and most recently, the Humboldt University in Berlin, Schlink, 62, had already won the reading world’s attention with a series of detective stories at whose center a private detective with the portentous name "Selb," (German for "self") unravels mysteries that force him to confront his own past. Published in 1995, it attained proverbial overnight-acclaim, winning the WELT Prize for Literature, awarded by the prestigious German newspaper Die Welt, and several other international book awards.ĭer Vorleser had not been Schlink’s first foray into literature. The overwhelming, Oscar-promoted success of The Reader ( Der Vorleser) came as no real surprise to those who had read Bernhard Schlink’s remarkable novel, either in its German original or in any one of the 39 languages into which it has been translated.
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