![]() ![]() And so their lovemaking is often postponed while she listens to another scene from Schiller or a chapter of Eichendorff. Hanna has an endearing quirk: she likes to be read to. Within a week, Hanna and Michael are embroiled in a passionate love affair. ![]() A few months later,Īfter he has recovered, he visits her apartment with a bouquet of flowers, a thank-you offering suggested by his mother. When he vomits in the street, she cleans him up and marches him home. Michael is a high school student with hepatitis. He meets his great love inĪ small university town sometime in the late 1950's. Michael Berg, the narrator and title character of ''The Reader,'' by Bernhard Schlink, is a cautious, self-protective young man who shies away from messy situations and ends up as something of a recluse. Spare and direct, it follows a pair of star-crossed lovers across theĭecades, with the kind of transparent yet mysterious, even outre, narrative line that you find in the 19th-century German novellas of, say, Heinrich von Kleist or Kafka's favorite, the Austrian Adalbert Stifter. ![]() German writer born in 1944, about a high school kid in love with a woman formerly employed at Auschwitz, leaps national boundaries and speaks straight to the heart. In this German novel, a young man discovers the wartime past of the woman he lovedĮarning that the love of your life used to be a concentration camp guard is not part of the American baby-boomer experience. ![]()
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