the reader

I've just finished reading Bernhard Schlink's The Reader.

M bought it for me in Waterstone's last time we were there. He mentioned the book while we were reading the cover of another but couldn't remember the author and then five minutes or so later we happened to pass a shelf and there it was. So he bought it for me. Who can ignore fate when it punches you in the face like that?

It was one of those books where I cried when I reached the end because there was no more story left. Bernhard Schlink has you, the reader, living the life of Michael Berg. You feel the emotional intensity of his passion for Hanna Schmitz and his grief at the revelations that lie around the corner in every page of this book. It's a love story set against the Holocaust and the Holocaust plays a central role, yet at the same time takes a back seat as the story of Michael and Hanna unfolds. Philosophical and yet curiously spare, I thought every sentence had meaning. Sometimes I skipped back a few pages just to read them again and try to absorb the bareness of the language and the heavy meaning that lay within each one.

One of the passages in the book which touched me really deeply and made me think was one on collective guilt. As a white 'daughter of Africa', (and I say that ironically), collective guilt, or 'white guilt' is my constant companion. White guilt is ever present, yet easily negated.

How many white people from Africa distance themselves from their backgrounds by saying 'Yes, my parents are terribly racist, but I'm not like that at all!'?  I know I'm guilty of this, because I truly believe I'm nothing like my parents generation, yet at the same time I am the product of my upbringing so I must accept, at some level, the similarities between me and them.

The burden of choice, made by the previous generation, regardless of their own personal involvement in that choice, weighs heavily. In a situation like that of the current Zimbabwe the pendulum eventually swings back and almost everyone who negated their background and distanced themselves from their past previously will now vociferously support the failure of black rule and quote statistics about how Zimbabwe was once the bread basket of Africa.

They, our parents, are collectively guilty of the crime of trying to protect a dream, whether ethically correct or otherwise, and we, as their descendants are collectively guilty just by the fact of being and of loving them. It's a bitter pill.

Bernhard Schlink says it better:

'I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind, accomodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?'

The other questions raised in the book are philosophical and deal with the responsibility of making choices and decisions and especially those that involve others. Michael talks to his father about his dilemma with revealing the secret that could have changed the future for Hanna. His father says:

'Don't you remember how furious you would get as a little boy when Mama knew best what was good for you? Even how far one can act like this with children is a real problem. It is a philosophical problem, but philosophy does not concern itself  with children. ...But with adults I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves. ... We're not talking about happiness, we're talking about dignity and freedom. Even as a little boy you knew the difference. It was no comfort to you that your mother was always right.'

This part made me reflect on the futility of making choices for other people. There's a whole spectrum of reasons why we might make choices for someone else, from absolving them of responsibility to actually believing we might be doing the right thing. In the end doing so does nothing except strip both parties of any dignity they might have had.

This book was deeply thought-provoking and I urge you to read it. If not for the philosophy, then for the story and the extreme clarity of the language.

Links to articles about The Reader or it's author:

NY Times
The Guardian

Reviews of Bernhard Schlink's new novel, Homecoming:

The Guardian
LA Times

I'd like to read Flights of Love next, as described in this review.

The Reader on Amazon.