Author: Bernhard Schlink
Translator: Jae-hyeok Kim
Publisher: Ireh
248 pages | 223*152mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
Oprah Book Club Selection, February 1999
Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into
English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex,
love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he
begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He
never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he
expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a
defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past, and it soon becomes
clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the
trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his
generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not
believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the
incomparable.... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and
guilt? To what purpose?"
The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize,
wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. What
does it mean to love those people--parents, grandparents, even
lovers--who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And
is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink's prose is clean
and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue, and excess in
any form. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the
attempt to breach the gap between Germany's pre- and postwar
generations, between the guilty and the innocent, and between words and
silence. --R. Ellis
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