But if the novel has undoubted merits, then this is primarily its inhuman restraint. In general it is understandable why from such a brief content one would a little bit cling to the head - the potential for eerie melodramatics in this story is simply enormous it seems that film director Stephen Daldry has fully realized it in his film adaptation. Further on this rather bleak story will happen and the third part, in which an adult hero unexpectedly starts to do for the heroine the same thing that he did to the 15-year-old after their passionate encounters - to read books aloud.

The Reader is also about this - its protagonist, an ordinary 15-year-old schoolboy, happens to be involved in a stormy affair with a woman 20 years his senior, and many years later, already a law student, unexpectedly meets her at a trial of security guards concentration camps among the accused. Schlink, at the time of writing the novel, was a former 50-year-old professor of history of law, almost all his career devoted to the study of the collective guilt of that generation of Germans that appeared on the ruins of the Second World War. Is it possible to put Schlink's novel on a par with the great ones is a question at least in some author's persuasiveness, The Reader is definitely not denied. First published in 1995 this novel spread throughout the world in such print runs, which German-language literature has not seen since the time of its eternal heroes and Nobel laureates like Hermann Hesse or Heinrich Böll. Written by Anastasia Melnyk, Patrick KennedyĪmong the most famed German novels written over the past few decades - that's what The Reader is.

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The Reader by Bernhard Schlink