I picked up The Story of Edgar Sawtelle a couple months ago, and it started off so amazing.  I absolutely loved the first 100 pages of it.  By time I got to around 150 – it was like pulling teeth.  I hated it!  I’ve been reading a page here – a page there – and it’s just boring me to tears.  I decided I needed to take a break from that book for a little while, and I went and picked up The Reader.

I’ve been hearing people talk about The Reader for a long time.  It’s currently a movie starring Kate Winslet.  And of course, it’s a best-selling novel by Bernhard Sclink.  I am really enjoying it so far.  It’s a short book, so I should be able to get through it quickly.

Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany’s Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? “We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable…. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?”