Genre: Fiction/Drama/Romance/Holocaust Novel


CRITIQUE:


So rarely does the sensitive genre of the Holocaust novels approached with such subtle touch, quiet dignity, and tactful imagination. Bernhard Schlink’s much-appraised German fiction, translated into English, THE READER not only represents one of mankind’s darkest affair with hatred and inhumanity, but it also draws philosophical questions about man’s capability to love, hate and seek redemption. It’s not only a Holocaust novel but it also studies the German conscience and the power of forgiveness, all seen through a unique tale of a boy’s love affair with a woman twice his age, stirring issues of coming-of-age, learning lessons in life and the scouring of the human heart and soul. As a love story, it transcends the genre, and makes it all the more a simple yet potent literary force.


It is written in a humble, serene and graceful prose, first evoking childhood imagery, a boy’s discovery of love, lust and companionship with an older woman who works at a tram company, then later, as fate turns its capricious claws, they were both driven by their impulses and misunderstandings, both in themselves and the country they live in. She becomes an Auschwitz camp guard, he becomes a law practitioner – and the next moment they laid eyes was in a court; she being trialled, he as a court apprentice. But what remains is the once little boy who reads literature to her stays in her consciousness.


This is soon to be adapted into the silverscreen, Stephen Daldry (THE HOURS, BILLY ELLIOT) starring Kate Winslet as Frau Schmitz and Ralph Fiennes as Michael Berg. But prior to its visual transformation, the book is enough to create vivid pictures in the mind of a reader: that love knows no boundaries.


VERDICT:

The dignity of THE READER runs along the veins of its tactful prose, and in its blood, in its very core – is a compelling story about love, loss and redemption. After you’ve read it, one would realise its heartbreaking beauty that is deeply profound.



RATING: A