The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

It made me think a lot The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.

I found this book at the second hand store of the ladies of Books for Dogs.

This book is technically perfect, and while I was reading it, I thought that it was a long time that I didn't read a book clear like this one, and I also thought I would want to have the clarity of passages of this author.

Feelings, moments, are analyzed with an extreme, accurate precision, and times are so perfects that if I wouldn't know that this one is a work of fiction, I would think that the author has experienced a story like this one, for realism, for capability of entering in the souls of  characters without banality, without lightness because, this one is an unusual love-story and it will create a powerful connection also for the rest of the protagonists's existences.

The story the one of Michael a 15 years old boy. Being sick and often at home, once, after a walk, he is brought home by a lady. His mother insists for thanking the lady and Michael will bring her a bouquet of flowers falling enchanted by her beauty body. Hanna is 35 years old.

Soon starts a torbid, tender, in part violent relationship. The woman called Hanna will call him "Kid." Michael is completely absorbed by her, but what happens starts to be a secret. It is so unusual in a relationship like this one and a love that it is impossible to sharing openly, because it wouldn't be understood, misunderstood.

These kind of relationships bring silences and secrets; a condition that Michael would have experienced for a long time.

Realistically Michael hasn't been in grade later to build any kind of solid relationship with other women because of the intensity felt emotionally for this woman when a teen-ager.

He was still, as called Hanna him, a "Kid" in a dangerous age, when hormons are not just brilliants but they have absolutely the necessity of exploding, so people meet along the way are fundamental for growing up harmonically sexually and emotionally as well.

Hanna will become Michael's secret, but what they lived, strangely hasn't been lived by Michael as a deviant relationship but as the best relationship of his existence.

He adored this lady.

Then, one day, after months of passion and desire, Hanna just disappeared leaving Michael alone with his desire, with his confusion, with his delusion.

He will grow up more cynically because he felt the sensation that he was thrown away. He didn't receive any communication from her. It was difficult to him to being the old Michael knew by his friends. ichael had lost his treasure.

Divided in three part, the second one is absorbed by the trial where the Hanna is involved in. A trial about some people in the SS and again Holocaust, and again perpretation of injustices.

Michael is becoming a lawyer and teachers ask to students of followinf this case. He doesn't know who the people involved in this case are, but then he recognizes Hanna, he understands...He understands why she didn't act clearly. He also understands during the trial that she is illitterate. She doesn't know how to read and write but she feels shame and she wouldn't confess this.

The book is called The Reader, because per years Michael will send her tapes in prison of his most beloved books, reading and recording them for her. An activity he did also when they started their relationship.

Michael, following the trial, understands that he was in love with a criminal and he starts to feel also a sensation of guilt. He made love with a criminal. He went to the house of a criminal and he didn't know that. I entered in Michael's mind thinking at the devastation that the protagonist must have felt at first. He didn't know and Holocaust is a shame that won't never heal in Germany.

I thought at Hanna as well.

Maybe she found in Michael someone cleaned, a new life at the beginning of his sexual existence. Maybe she lived secluded and she needed a change and this change was represented by a teen-ager.

I guess that, as also portrayed by the author, she knew this relationship was impossible, but at the same time the control she had on him and his soul was enormous.

Michael was substantially completely "under her wings" experiencing a role of  subjection and devotion although sometimes he felt irritation because not satisfied by her answers, because there was something unclear.

Hanna was conflictual. She couldn't tell, she couldn't explain her past to Michael, buried by her same old and horrible secrets and it created a wall that could not be intellectually climbed.

When Michael asked her something, she was cryptic.

At the end of the book you'll find some questions for discussing this book in a book club and one question asks if, for case to you Hanna wouldn't never have done what she did, if she had read and if she had known. In a few words, if she had culture.

To me she would have done the same things, because what created by Hitler was a horrible system and that system had to work, and culture couldn't change this state of things. I will add more: I guess that knowledge put in hands of someone with a devilsh character could become an additional instrument for creating more messes and more dangerous situations.

Most of the people who perpetrated horrors read books and had culture, but culture didn't help them to understand the atrocities of what they were doing, no; simply there has been a big manipulation on people's minds, insisting in crucial points, creating discrimination, creating hate, and justifying the horror.

People of a country are like sheep in most cases and they follow what politicians tell them, as good children would do with their parents. That's why that horrors have been possible, and that's why it is indispensible to continue to speak of this thematic. That's why these books exist.

There was a man who lived in a city close to me. He put bodies of people in the crematory ovens in Auschwitz. For what they told me, I haven't never met him in person for an interview, and it's my only regret, now he is dead, they said he cried for the rest of his life, because these atrocities can't never be removed by the mind, they remain, because there was too much innaturality, there was too much horror, there was too much death and, again, injustice. He continued to repeat for all his life that he had to do that job. In opposite case they would have killed him.

Hanna understood the atrocities of what she did. She started to read books written by people she damaged, like Primo Levi and many other ones, and tired of freedom and prison, tired of a dictatorship that ruined her, understanding the nonsense of war, decided what it was better to do for closing her existence.

She was another soul in a cage built by a system created by a dictator; she joined that system, but conclusions are that what happened wouldn't never set her free completely; she knew that she could have been captured; she knew she was in a cage.

She knew that past couldn't be erased.

This book made me think also because of choices made in life and what happen of existences if these choices are disgraceful: you musn't be an SS, you musn't join a dictator's idea, for ruining your own existence.

Chosing wrong people, wrong friends, wrong connections, can mean a devastation for the existence of people.

I personally find psychologically interesting the character of Michael because 'till the end close to this lady, connected with her in a wire, strong and solid, unable to being cut by him. Not only: as in a regression he reads for her books; books that he had previously read to her, who knows if for searching again that old moments spent together, for establishing a contact, for remarking the importance she had on him. I found this part of the book touching.

Michael was a devoted man under many aspects.

If that day Michael wouldn't have brought her that flowers, his existence would have been completely different. Each action is a reaction, as physics tell us and also a little, innocent, apparently insignificant gesture can means an important deviation from the harmonic existence of an individual, or, romantically, defining his destiny.

Pretty scaring.

Highly, highly recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori