Sam Review's "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink - October 2015

Sam's Notes Taken Along the Way

Part One, Chapter Three
I appreciate the smooth, but not excessive, descriptions of this author.

When did we as a society stop ironing our clothes as part of the laundry ritual?  I know my grandma still does it, but my mom only ever did special items for special occasions.


Part One, Chapter Four
This is the second book in a row that goes out of it's way to describe a female character as "heavy but not excessively heavy" but in a polite and (almost) positive way.

Part One, Chapter Five
The rationale that going and doing the thing you fantasize about is better than just fantasizing so that you don't get stuck in the fantasy is so weird.  Or, maybe it's just the phrasing, since the author is German and this book is translated.  "It is better to go out and do it than you always wonder, 'What if?'"

Part One, Chapter Six
I can't determine the age difference between the narrator and Frau Frau Schmitz.

Part One, Chapter Eight
Okay, so the narrator, Michael is fifteen, but lets Hanna (I had to look up that Frau is the German word for Mrs.) think he is seventeen.  And she is clearly an adult, but still not too weird, for a little while I thought was much younger.


Part One, Chapter Nine
And Hanna is 36, so a 21 year age difference between these two characters.

I like the line when the narrator, Michael is talking about feeling proud of being with the one your with, despite the age difference and the way it appears.

Part One, Chapter Ten
While I understand the gesture is supposed to be intimate, the idea of being bathed by someone has always seemed creepy and awkward to me.

Part One, Chapter Fourteen
I know that there are some theater's where you can drink while you watch the movie, but they are few and far between.  I wish it was more common "Champagne at intermission."


Part Two, Chapter Five
So was Hanna on trial for letting a bunch of Jewish women burn to death in a church where they were forced to work when she, and the other women on trial, could have opened the doors?

Part Two, Chapter Seven
I can't tell if it is creepy or considerate of Hanna to have taken in the weak and delicate girls and treated them well and had them read to her at night.

Part Two, Chapter Eight
It's kind of amazing that after the church fire, these two Jews, who probably looked pretty haggard from the concentration camps, were able to just walk out.  The villagers let go of whatever hate they were supposed to feel and just said "These two are survivors, let's warm them and feed them and let them go on their way."  I also wonder if that story is true.

Part Two, Chapter Nine
Not that I think the people involved in the Holocaust shouldn't have been tried and punished for their crimes.  But it does seem crazy that the trial we're reading about happened 15 years after the fact.

Part Two, Chapter Fifteen
When the narrator is talking about walking through the concentration camps trying to imagine what they must have looked like filled but not being able to, it made me think about 9/11.  How, it's a tragedy and a disaster that happened during my time in this world and, yet somehow, I never think that I feel sad enough about it when it comes around, and it makes me feel really guilty.

Part Three, Chapter Five
It is strange how strongly I sympathize with the narrator about not being able to let go.  And while I didn't expect him to start recording readings and sending them to Hannah in jail, I'm also not at all surprised that he did.

Trying to imagine how it must have felt for Hannah to receive such a random, large, and intimate gift from someone she hadn't actually interacted with for years.

Part Three, Chapter Six
Imagining what Hanna's handwriting must have looked like, and how determined she must have been to learn it just to be able to address a three lined note to the boy who read to her.  So many feels.  (Again with the guilt about not feeling things about the concentration camp scenes, but I feel strong feelings about this bit).

Part Three, Chapter Seven
While I like Hanna's character, the letter from the warden brings up an interesting issue.  During her trial, Hanna was considered a monster due to the fact that she let people burn to death while she heard and more or less watched.  However, 18 years after this heinous crime, she is more than likely going to be released into the world and the jail / community is going to help her get an apartment and a job and they also reach out to other people to help them as well.  I have heard this discussion / debate before in other circumstances (mostly petty drug charges throwing people's lives through the ringer) but it is definitely a topic I'm interested to hear your guys' thoughts on.

Part Three, Chapter Eight
Was reading aloud to people something that was a cultural norm a long time ago?  In "The Book Thief" there is another circumstance where a young person reads to an older person who never either didn't know how or wasn't good at it.  And, I will say, when talking about something I've written I like to hear it aloud, and I like to read aloud to myself (unfortunately I don't have a good voice for recording so I can't do it for anyone else's benefit).  But it always seems strange and awkward to ask someone to read aloud for you.

It is so sad that with every other woman he was with they just didn't "feel right" and when he finally gets to see Hanna again and holds her, she doesn't "feel right".

Part Three, Chapter Ten
I was not expectinf Hanna to kill herself and I was very disappointed.

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Quotes Worth Mentioning

Part One, Chapter Seven
"Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him.  The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with and that curls up in your lap, purring, to be stroked - you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing - buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box, and trips to the vet - is really too much.  Your life is elsewhere.  I wish that we, his family, had been his life.  ...  Why should we children be his whole life?  We were growing up and soon we'd be adults and out of the house."

Part One, Chapter Nine
"I am amazed at how much confidence Hanna gave me. ... The girls I met noticed and liked it that I wasn't afraid of them.  I felt at ease in my own body."  - While I think this is something most people feel when they are happy in their relationship, I think it is more true when you are with someone who is older, or more grounded, than you.

Part One, Chapter Twelve
"I have them [the pictures of Hanna] stored away, I can project them on a mental screen and watch them, unchanged, unconsumed.  There are long periods when I don't think about them at all.  But they always come back into my head, and then I sometimes have to run them repeatedly though my mental projector and watch them."

Part One, Chapter Fourteen
"When an an airplane's engines fail, it is not the end of the flight.  Airplanes don't fall out of the sky like stones.  They glide on, the enormous multi-engined passenger jets, for thirty, forty-five minutes, only to smash themselves up when they attempt a landing.  The passengers don't notice a thing.  Flying feels the same whether the engines are working or not.  ...  That summer was the glide path of our love.  Or rather, of my love for Hanna.  I don't know about her love for me."

Part One, Chapter Fifteen
"I put my arm around her waist, and didn't care what people might think of us as a couple, and I was proud that I didn't care.  At the same time, I knew that in the theater in our hometown I would care.  Did she know that, too?"

Part One, Chapter Sixteen
"What do you want now?  Your whole life in one night?"

Part Two, Chapter One
"[The memory of her] it's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it.  But why should you?"

Part Two, Chapter Two
"What is law?  Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society?  Or is low what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books."

Part Two, Chapter Nine
"Not that it was impossible to imagine the confusion and helplessness Hanna described.  The night, the cold, the snow, the fire, the screaming of the women in the church, the sudden departure of the people who had commanded and escorted the female guards - how could the situation have been easy?  But could an acknowledgement that the situation had been hard be any mitigation for what the defendants had done or not done?  As if it had been a car accident on a lonely road on a cold winter night, with injuries and totaled vehicles, and no one knowing what to do?  That is how one could imagine what Hanna was describing but nobody was willing to look at it in such terms."

Part Two, Chapter Ten
"Could Hanna's shame at being illiterate be sufficient reason for her behavior at the trail or in the camp?  To accept exposure as a criminal for fear for being exposed as an illiterate?"

"She was not pursuing her own interests, but fighting for her own truth, her own justice.  Because she always had to dissimulate somewhat, and could never be completely candid, it was a pitiful truth and a pitiful justice, but it was hers, and the struggle for it was her struggle."

"And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal."

Part Two, Chapter Twelve
"With adults, I see absolutely no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves."
"Not even if they themselves are happy about it later?"
He shook his head.  "We're not talking about happiness, we're talking about dignity and freedom.  Even as a little boy, you knew the difference.  It was no comfort to you that your mother was always right.
..."If one knows what is good for another person who in turn is blind to it, then one must try to open his eyes.  One has to leave him the last word, but one must talk to him, to him and not to someone else behind his back."

Part Two, Chapter Sixteen
"I wasn't really concerned with justice.  I couldn't leave Hanna the way she was, or wanted to be. I had to meddle with her, have some kind of influence and effect on her, if not directly then indirectly." - (Even though he didn't actually tell the Judge anything).

Part Two, Chapter Seventeen
"I was sitting in the same place I always sat.  But she looked straight ahead and through everything.  A proud, wounded, lost, and infinitely tired look.  A look that wished to see nothing and no one."

Part Three, Chapter One
"Parental expectations, from which every generation must free itself, were nullified by the fact that these parents had failed to measure up during the Third Reich, or after it ended.  How could those who had committed Nazi crimes or watched them happen or looked away while they were happening or tolerated the criminals among them after 1945 or even accepted them - how could they have anything to say to their children?"

"Love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible." - I have never really bought into the "You can't choose who you fall in love with".  I have always felt that love and being faithful is a conscious choice that you have to make every day.  I do believe it is not in our nature to be monogamous, not to say we cannot be, but that it will be a constant struggle and a daily choice that we have to make, we are fully responsible for who we love and for making our own happiness.

Part Three, Chapter Two
"The truth in what one says, lies in what one does,"

Part Three, Chapter Six
"[On illiteracy] ... about how much energy it takes to conceal one's inability to read and write, energy lost to actual living.  Illiteracy is dependence.  By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.
"Then I looked at Hanna's handwriting and saw how much energy and struggle the writing had cost her.  I was proud of her.  At the same time, I was sorry for her, sorry for her delayed and failed life, sorry for the delays and failures in life in general.  ... Is there no such thing as "too late"?  Is there only "late", and is "late" always better than "never"?  I don't know."

Part Three, Chapter Twelve
"I think [the story] is true, and thus the question of whether it is saf or happy has no meaning whatever."