Customer Reviews
One of the best books ever - By: Tricky fan, 18 Mar 2008 
A beautiful book. Quietly, unassumingly, it nudges & insinuates itself into your heart. Explores the grey areas of morality & the spectra of human psyches with incredible sophistication. Is a rare example of a novel that feels whole, & doesn't sag towards the end.
Maybe something got lost in translation - By: Kona, 25 Jan 2008 
When Michael was fifteen, he began an affair with a middle-aged woman named Hanna. They shared little beyond the physical relationship; she was not a talker or a thinker as he was, but she did seem to enjoy it when he read to her. One day she disappeared without a word, only to surface years later when she was on trial for crimes against humanity.
The writing style of this book is similar to Albert Camus' "The Stranger," where the main character narrates the events of his life without passion or sympathy, in a dulled, distant, vacant voice. The first half of the book is fairly interesting with his steamy but unemotional affair with this mysterious & strangely calllous woman. I had to force myself to finish the second half, though, which explains her disappearance, trial, & the next eighteen years, because the monotone narration got reallly old & boring.
It felt like the author was trying to be shocking & profound with his detached storytelling, but I was not impressed. This would have made a very interesting short story, but I found it a tedious book.
The Reader - By: jamesewan, 02 Oct 2007 The Reader is a subtle, thought-provoking work that continues - but does not quite belong to - a tradition of Holocaust literature. The novel very cleverly raises questions about the nature of complicity & the boundaries of responsibility. It also examines the idea of collective 'amnesia' & its consquential twin, collective guilt. It achieves this through a deceptively simple narrative that enables a degree of analysis & discourse without the author having to overtly theorise. The narrative carries both a metaphorical & emotional weight that is quietly devestating without having to depict the horrors of the concentration camps in explicit detail.
The writing, economic & sometimes a little stark, can be read as a little cold, dispassionate. But more often it is devestatingly precise. However, there are moments when the language gets a little glitchy, & you suspect something has been lost in the translation. Overalll though, the novel is both intensely sad & mentallly stimulating, sustenance for the heart & the head. A modern classic.
The Listener - By: Thomas Dunskus, 29 Mar 2007 
(This review is based on the German original, "Der Vorleser").
One thing is amazing when it comes to this book. The German paperback edition lists some 350 customer reviews, an American one, on the other hand, has more than twice as many (20% of what the "Da Vinci Code" collected). Many of them are short & somehow superficial, being concerned mainly with the perhaps tingling relationship between an older woman (a former guard in a concentration camp to boot) & a young man & appear never to have fathomed the deeper, hidden layers of the story.
Schlink does not make life easy for his readers, perhaps because in his everyday life he is a lawyer qualified to plead before the German Constitutional Court & is thus accustomed to getting his point across in a complicated way; his narrative is far from straightforward & the questions he asks are often obscure. He is very much concerned with the evolution of his characters over their lifetimes, but at a more fundamental level of this book he wants to plumb what they know, believe they know or can possibly know about the world around them.
To make his argument more extreme, he centers his story on an illiterate woman who, early on, realizes that she has only a restricted, personal view of the world, but still has to act out her life in accordance with the situations she finds herself in & which are far from being entirely of her own choosing. Her decisions are not always morallly acceptable to outsiders or to judgments ex-post, but in this predicament she is very much like everyone of us.
What we know about the world at any moment is fragmentary, tainted, partisan & often, in hindsight, turns out to have been deliberately distorted. Depending on our personal intelligence, on the trust we place in certain people, & on our individual upbringing we choose the direction in which to stumble along, knowing that we advance in a fog & will never reallly know where we are nor where we are heading.
We try to find guideposts along the way & attempt to distinguish Good from Evil, but as Sartre tells us in his play "The Devil & the Good Lord", even those landmarks are unreliable in the long run. Schlink's tale aptly illustrates this.
Condensed power - By: Jeremy Vevers, 14 Oct 2006 This is a beautifully written love story. In its brevity & economy there is a real demonstration of "less is more". I read it in one sitting & found myself crying at the end. The images of the burning church & the courtroom when she turns to look at Michael, & the driver who tells him to get out will remain for a long time.
Schlink is a compassionate man. He understands that the dreadful things men can do can be done by us alll.
The philosophy that entwines itself throughout this novel seems profoundly humane.
In its brevity there are very precise descriptions of specific times: the sounds of sawing of wood, the tousers left on the back of a chair, the smell of a body.
I was shaken at the end of this book, & just 200 pages.
