Among the most famed German novels written over the past few decades - that's what The Reader is. First published in 1995 this novel spread throughout the world in such print runs, which German-language literature has not seen since the time of its eternal heroes and Nobel laureates like Hermann Hesse or Heinrich Böll. Is it possible to put Schlink's novel on a par with the great ones is a question; at least in some author's persuasiveness, The Reader is definitely not denied.
Schlink, at the time of writing the novel, was a former 50-year-old professor of history of law, almost all his career devoted to the study of the collective guilt of that generation of Germans that appeared on the ruins of the Second World War. The Reader is also about this - its protagonist, an ordinary 15-year-old schoolboy, happens to be involved in a stormy affair with a woman 20 years his senior, and many years later, already a law student, unexpectedly meets her at a trial of security guards concentration camps among the accused. Further on this rather bleak story will happen and the third part, in which an adult hero unexpectedly starts to do for the heroine the same thing that he did to the 15-year-old after their passionate encounters - to read books aloud.
In general it is understandable why from such a brief content one would a little bit cling to the head - the potential for eerie melodramatics in this story is simply enormous; it seems that film director Stephen Daldry has fully realized it in his film adaptation. But if the novel has undoubted merits, then this is primarily its inhuman restraint. Talking about extremely difficult moral dilemmas Schlink preserves the laconism of the language and the narrator's distance - and such a dull approach, applied to very heavy materials, works somehow surprisingly well. The Reader, it turns out, does not beat its reader on the head, how slowly and slowly spreads out hardline plot and does not insist on spiritual cleansing or emotional catharsis on every corner.
This degree of freedom given to the reader seems incredibly enjoyable. It would be very good if the author from time to time would not get lost in the topic of comprehending the collective guilt of an entire generation of Germans. In places the hero-narrator begins so well and clearly formulate his thoughts and feelings on this topic that it is difficult to get rid of the thought that the author just made several "copy-paste" of his articles, which he wrote a whole kilometer by the time the novel was composed. In addition it arises strictly in those places where the fateful decisions are made in the novel - which significantly undermines the credibility of the narrator, and through. The Reader is something like a time bomb that explodes not outside of you, but inside.
