December Books 1) The Reader
1) The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink
A fifteen-year-old German boy has a love affair with a woman twenty years older, in the early 1960s; years later, he finds himself observing her trial for war crimes - she had been a concentration camp guard, and is jailed. He knows she is innocent of some of the charges, but complicit none the less. I guess Hanna is a metaphor for Germany itself, with its difficulty in reading its own past. The end is not a happy one.
(PS: top UnSuggestion for this book is the Harry Potter boxed set, by J.K. Rowling. I can understand that.)
A fifteen-year-old German boy has a love affair with a woman twenty years older, in the early 1960s; years later, he finds himself observing her trial for war crimes - she had been a concentration camp guard, and is jailed. He knows she is innocent of some of the charges, but complicit none the less. I guess Hanna is a metaphor for Germany itself, with its difficulty in reading its own past. The end is not a happy one.
(PS: top UnSuggestion for this book is the Harry Potter boxed set, by J.K. Rowling. I can understand that.)