latest read - The Reader

Hear about this story since it was made into a movie. I didn't catch the movie but thought of reading the story instead.
So last Friday afternoon, I took the afternoon to sit down and finish this book.



The story in a nutshell is given the the last pages of the book under "The Brief":

Set in post-war Germany, The Reader begins as an erotic love story but later becomes a philosophical enquiry into the effects of the Holocaust on a generation whose parents are perceived as at best complicit, at worst perpetrators. Central to the novel is the question: what is to be done with the knowledge and the guilt of the Holocaust?

When Michael Berg is taken ill on his way home from school a stranger helps him out. After winter spent sick with hepatitis, Michael's mother sends him to thank the stranger. Finding his way into Hanna's house, he surprises her when she arrives home. While she changes out of her work clothes, Michael watches through the crack of the door, running away when she catches his eye. He returns and their affair begins.

When Hanna asks Michael to read to her it soon becomes an essential part of their routine. Then one day Hanna disappears.

When Michael next sees her, he is a law student and she is on trial for her part in a war crime. During a bombing raid, while guarding a group of women in transit between camps, Hanna and her fellow SS guards locked the women inside a church. All but two were burnt to death. The author of the report describing this terrible event is considered the most culpable defendant. Hanna refuses to deny that she wrote it despite the fact that, as Michael finally realised, she is illiterate.

Michael is faced with a dilemma: if he convinces the judge of Hanna's illiteracy she will be given a lighter sentence, but given that she is too proud to confess it herself, would she want it exposed? He seeks advice but eventually lets it go and when Hanna is sentenced to life he is haunted with guilt. His marriage fails after five years and he struggles to find some sort of meaning in his work. Eventually, he begins to record his favourite books for Hanna. When the prison governor writes to tell him that Hanna will soon be leaving prison, he visits her for the first, and last, time.