Resumo de The Reader - Bernard Schlenk

One of the most fascinating things about "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlenk is the variety of interpretations its readers and reviewers have come up with. Indeed, as implied by the title of this fascinating book, Schlenk seems to suggest that its readers, too, may read the story in differing ways

The story takes place in Germany and encompasses two periods in the life of Michael, enacted under the long shadow cast by the Second World War. In the first period, Michael is a schoolboy who is initiated into sex by a young woman a few years his senior. In exchange, she persuades him to read her.

In the second period, Michael is a young law student, who attends a trial at which Hanna is tried for her part in a Second World atrocity. "Obeying orders", she allowed a group of people locked inside a church to burn to death. Hanna tells it like it was, unembellished, and her co-accused soon realise that they can save themselves by condemning Hanna. In the court, Michael pretends he does not recognise her; to a young man of his generation, friendship (or even a past) with a Nazi war criminal is unthinkable.

Finally, and indeed rather touchingly, he tumbles to the secret or truth Hanna has found herself unable to tell; she cannot read. This is her shame, and the story ends when Michael takes up his role as "reader" again.

The richness of the story lie in the layers of meaning Schlenk constructs for us. The first, for me, was the book's underlying commentary on how we see our world and the extent to which we adjust our morality with hindsight. Chile, Argentina and then South Africa taught us that it is vain to expect to get to the heart of the truth because the truth is locked in "another country". Survival demands of perpetrators that they find ways to reinterpret and live with their shame.

Hanna's personal shame is that she cannot read. But her illiteracy is both literal and metaphorical. She cannot 'read' the context in which she finds herself at the trial, and so cannot save herself. She cannot fictionalise her experiences so she fails to re-imagine herself.

Time has passed its judgement on Hanna. Thus, on the one level, ?The Reader? the story of a young woman who lacks the historic judgement to reinterpret her own "story".

Her real shame lies in this: like so many others who have not learned to read, she will go to great lengths to conceal the fact. She stands naked and ashamed in the "guilt" of her illiteracy. And, of course, on another level, she represents a commentary on truth and memory and the extreme vulnerability of a woman who cannot hide her past under a cloak of words.

Michael, too, has grown up. As a schoolboy, he was fascinated by the older, seductive Hanna and what she could teach him. As a student, he finds her again in the most unexpected of places; at a Nazi war hearing. But, finally, out of compassion or even curiosity, he takes up his old pursuit of reading to her ? this time in prison. We are, Schlenk, seems to be telling us, none of us able to shrug off the past and its shadows entirely. We need to keep our memories but, if we are to survive them, we must find new ways to coexist and reinterpret the world.

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