Announced on February 26, 1999
About the Book
Michael Berg is 15 and suffering from hepatitis. When he gets sick in the street one day on his way home from school, a woman brings him into her apartment and helps him to wash up. Later, he visits the woman to thank her and is drawn into a love affair that is as intoxicating as it is unusual—their meetings become a ritual of reading aloud (Michael reads to Hanna, at her request), taking showers and making love. When Hanna disappears after a misunderstanding, Michael is overcome with guilt and loss.
Years later, when Michael is studying law at the university, he is part of a seminar group attending one of the many belated Nazi war crime trials. He is shocked when he recognizes Hanna in the courtroom, on trial with a group of former concentration camp guards. During the proceedings, it becomes clear that Hanna is hiding something that is—to her—more shameful than murder, something that could possibly save her from going to prison. She chooses not to reveal her secret and, as a result, is sentenced to life.
Married and divorced, Michael has become a scholar of legal history and suffers from a haunting emotional numbness. To help himself through nights of insomnia, he begins to read his favorite books aloud into a tape recorder and sends the tapes to Hanna in prison. The bond between the two is continued in this unique way until Hanna's release from prison, when, in the face of Michael's ambivalence and Hanna's shame, their story reaches its anguished conclusion.
A parable of German guilt and atonement and a love story of stunning power, The Reader is also a work of literature that is unforgettable in its psychological complexity, its moral nuances and its stylistic restraint.
About the Author
Bernhard Schlink was born in 1944 near Bielefeld, Germany, to a German father and a Swiss mother. He grew up in Heidelberg and studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin. He is a professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law and the Philosophy of Law at Berlin's Humbolt University and a justice of the Constitutional Law Court in Bonn.
Schlink has authored works in both fiction and nonfiction. Before publishing The Reader (original title: Der Vorleser) in 1995, he wrote several prize-winning mystery novels.
Since its publication, The Reader has become a phenomenal international bestseller and has been translated into 39 languages and was the first German novel to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The movie rights to The Reader have been sold to Miramax Films. The film stars Ralph Fiennes, David Kross and Kate Winslet, and is directed by Stephen Daldry. Learn more about the film at TheReader-Movie.com.
Watch a preview of the movie
Favorite Books
I am most at home with 19th-century literature—Stendhal, Hawthorne, Chekhov, Keller and Fontane. These are books I read and reread to be happy. I never felt the urge to analyze why I am happy with them; and also with the Odyssey, a book that keeps surprising and amazing me.
Then there are books that I will never forget because I read them when I started reading in English. The reading was hard and I made them mine sentence by sentence, word by word. I thought I should start with something easy—mysteries—and happened to find Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Chandler's The Long Goodbye and Ambler's The Intercom Conspiracy—books about entanglement, love, guilt and the possibility or impossibility of redemption. Simple, precise and magical books.
Loving books means taking time for the unexpected, reading a book you have never heard about before or that you missed when everybody talked about it years ago, a book on a friend's bookshelf that somehow triggers your curiosity even though it doesn't fit into your taste or reading habits. Sitting on a train with a book I have picked up in a hurry at the small train station bookstore and finding out that the book is great, as it just happened to me with Toni Morrison's Beloved and also with Pat Barker's Resurrection—that is a perfect moment.
Book Reviews
"A counterpointing of two stories, or a story and a history, of victim and victimizer, culpability and disavowal, indictment and extenuation. ... Bernhard Schlink has taken on a grievously formidable subject. ...We praise books that, as we say, make us think. The Reader makes us think ... about things we would rather not think about, issues which the book leaves open and we might wish to have closed one way or another."
— The New York Review of Books
"Beautiful, disturbing ... ensnares both heart and mind."
— Los Angeles Times
"It speaks straight to the heart."
— Suzanne Ruta, The New York Times
"A compact portrayal of a teenaged German boy's love affair with an emotionally remote older woman, and the troubled consequence of his discovery of who she really is and why she simultaneously needed him and rejected him. Seven years after their intimacy, university student Michael Berg accidentally learns that (now) 40ish Hannah Schmitz had concealed from him a past that reaches back to Auschwitz and had burdened her with nightmares from which her young lover was powerless to awaken her. Toward its climax, the novel becomes, fitfully, frustratingly abstract, but on balance this is a gripping psychological study that moves skillfully toward its surprising and moving conclusion."
— Kirkusny Minghella
Get more resources on The Reader, an Oprah's Book Club selection.
View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
Michael Berg is 15 and suffering from hepatitis. When he gets sick in the street one day on his way home from school, a woman brings him into her apartment and helps him to wash up. Later, he visits the woman to thank her and is drawn into a love affair that is as intoxicating as it is unusual—their meetings become a ritual of reading aloud (Michael reads to Hanna, at her request), taking showers and making love. When Hanna disappears after a misunderstanding, Michael is overcome with guilt and loss.
Years later, when Michael is studying law at the university, he is part of a seminar group attending one of the many belated Nazi war crime trials. He is shocked when he recognizes Hanna in the courtroom, on trial with a group of former concentration camp guards. During the proceedings, it becomes clear that Hanna is hiding something that is—to her—more shameful than murder, something that could possibly save her from going to prison. She chooses not to reveal her secret and, as a result, is sentenced to life.
Married and divorced, Michael has become a scholar of legal history and suffers from a haunting emotional numbness. To help himself through nights of insomnia, he begins to read his favorite books aloud into a tape recorder and sends the tapes to Hanna in prison. The bond between the two is continued in this unique way until Hanna's release from prison, when, in the face of Michael's ambivalence and Hanna's shame, their story reaches its anguished conclusion.
A parable of German guilt and atonement and a love story of stunning power, The Reader is also a work of literature that is unforgettable in its psychological complexity, its moral nuances and its stylistic restraint.
About the AuthorBernhard Schlink was born in 1944 near Bielefeld, Germany, to a German father and a Swiss mother. He grew up in Heidelberg and studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin. He is a professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law and the Philosophy of Law at Berlin's Humbolt University and a justice of the Constitutional Law Court in Bonn.
Schlink has authored works in both fiction and nonfiction. Before publishing The Reader (original title: Der Vorleser) in 1995, he wrote several prize-winning mystery novels.
Since its publication, The Reader has become a phenomenal international bestseller and has been translated into 39 languages and was the first German novel to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The movie rights to The Reader have been sold to Miramax Films. The film stars Ralph Fiennes, David Kross and Kate Winslet, and is directed by Stephen Daldry. Learn more about the film at TheReader-Movie.com.
Watch a preview of the movie
Favorite Books
I am most at home with 19th-century literature—Stendhal, Hawthorne, Chekhov, Keller and Fontane. These are books I read and reread to be happy. I never felt the urge to analyze why I am happy with them; and also with the Odyssey, a book that keeps surprising and amazing me.
Then there are books that I will never forget because I read them when I started reading in English. The reading was hard and I made them mine sentence by sentence, word by word. I thought I should start with something easy—mysteries—and happened to find Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Chandler's The Long Goodbye and Ambler's The Intercom Conspiracy—books about entanglement, love, guilt and the possibility or impossibility of redemption. Simple, precise and magical books.
Loving books means taking time for the unexpected, reading a book you have never heard about before or that you missed when everybody talked about it years ago, a book on a friend's bookshelf that somehow triggers your curiosity even though it doesn't fit into your taste or reading habits. Sitting on a train with a book I have picked up in a hurry at the small train station bookstore and finding out that the book is great, as it just happened to me with Toni Morrison's Beloved and also with Pat Barker's Resurrection—that is a perfect moment.
Book Reviews
"A counterpointing of two stories, or a story and a history, of victim and victimizer, culpability and disavowal, indictment and extenuation. ... Bernhard Schlink has taken on a grievously formidable subject. ...We praise books that, as we say, make us think. The Reader makes us think ... about things we would rather not think about, issues which the book leaves open and we might wish to have closed one way or another."
— The New York Review of Books
"Beautiful, disturbing ... ensnares both heart and mind."
— Los Angeles Times
"It speaks straight to the heart."
— Suzanne Ruta, The New York Times
"A compact portrayal of a teenaged German boy's love affair with an emotionally remote older woman, and the troubled consequence of his discovery of who she really is and why she simultaneously needed him and rejected him. Seven years after their intimacy, university student Michael Berg accidentally learns that (now) 40ish Hannah Schmitz had concealed from him a past that reaches back to Auschwitz and had burdened her with nightmares from which her young lover was powerless to awaken her. Toward its climax, the novel becomes, fitfully, frustratingly abstract, but on balance this is a gripping psychological study that moves skillfully toward its surprising and moving conclusion."
— Kirkusny Minghella
Get more resources on The Reader, an Oprah's Book Club selection.View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.
Published 02/26/1999
