The Reader, Bernhard Schlink (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

B.S. Wise, Oedipus and Jocasta

(May 10) It's challenging to review this book since I had such a bizarre experience with it.

There was a lot of hoopla surrounding the movie last year but I kind of avoided interest in the story because it sounded pretty dark. Then the movie won a few Academy Awards this spring and people on BookCel who hadn't read it back when it was a bestseller had taken up the book. Their very positive reviews, and those of people who'd read it years ago, persuaded me to gamely sign on as the eighty-third waiter-in-line at the library.

But when I finally got the book, I realized I had read it before. I just couldn't remember how each act in the play ended -- until I got there and went "oh yeah." I kept thinking that I must have put the book down unfinished at some point when I "first read" it. But I kept recognizing every scene and conversation, every philosophical passage, as I came to them, right till the end.

So that was either the longest sustained episode of déjà vu ever or I read the book many years ago and wasn't impressed enough to remember I'd read it when the movie came out. Is that a kind of review in itself? On the other hand, I was impressed with it this time through. It's really a very thoughtful allegory about guilt, and the love story is weirdly compelling.

I can only imagine that the first time I read it I must have thought it was about first-generation German guilt and must have thought it was being very second- or third-removed about it all. And I bet I didn't appreciate the abstract philosophizing and probably just rushed through those bits. Maybe I thought The Reader couldn't hold a candle to the most traumatizing book about the Holocaust I ever read -- Anya, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

But this time through I realized it was about second-generation guilt -- a whole different kind of psychological morass, and an absorbing one. I also appreciated the author's musings on his experience much more keenly than I must have originally. How awfully afloat one must feel to be the offspring of the most vilified generation in history. But then if that generation was collectively a Hanna, is it fair to vilify?

This whole interaction was further complicated by the fact that The Reader is a book about reading, and I'm a reader who normally doesn't like to re-read books. Also, it is a translation, which I always think of as the reading equivalent of washing your hands while wearing gloves. Strange bedfellows, The Reader and I.