Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion

In December we will be reading The Reader by Bernhard Schlink for our Love category - who's in?

I'm in.

I'm in also. Think I may have watched (some of) the film previously.

I’ll be in once I’ve finished Kavalier and Clay from last month.

I read this one a couple years ago. I probably won't re-read it though. Maybe I'll watch the film?

I’ve finished this and it wasn’t really that engaging for me. I didn’t care about Michael or Hanna, and found their relationship mildly disturbing but not of great interest.

I was more interested in the way the relationship mirrored the old and new generations in their view of the Holocaust, but even there I felt the (probably inevitable) lack of resolution unsatisfactory, and the arguments rather dry and legalistic.

Paradoxically, I can kind of see why others really liked this, but my personal reaction was lukewarm.

Finished. Liked it, but I do agree with most of Pamela's comments.

I gave it 3/5 - but, to be honest, it could have been 2 (or occasionally 4). Here's my review

I wavered between 3 and 4 stars, but I was probably too generous with my ratings last year, so I'm resolving to be stricter in 2023. My problem is that this is such a chilly book. The reviews on the cover talk about the "coiled eroticism" but I got none of that. I'd say perhaps it suffers in translation, but the reviewers were reading the English version.

When reading novels that involve child sexual abuse, you're always looking for the unreliable narrator. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert is the most unreliable of narrators, convinced the young girl he abuses is seducing him. In this one, Michael Berg is the unreliable narrator, not seeing how his sexual relationship as a 15 year old with a woman substantially more than twice his age is distancing him from his family and his peers and is distorting his views of sexuality and relationships. Hannah is of course damaged herself; seemingly unable to form any attachments with adults, she latches onto Michael as a crutch.

Across the next 30 years, the two form a crooked, imbalanced bond. The writing, however, is as icy and static as a mill pond in January - the sex scenes, perfunctory and without passion, the court scenes impersonal and observational. I wasn't 100% sure how much the concentration camp history was supposed to fill out the stories of both protagonists, which might explain why I didn't connect with this tale. Ultimately, I wasn't really sure why this book received the plaudits it did