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I'm not sure where I picked up Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (1995; translated -- well -- from the German by Carol Brown Janeway 1997) but I think it was fairly recently. What I do know is that I didn't spot one element of the cover until I'd got the book home: those dreaded words "Oprah's Book Club". I must have been looking at the quotes on the back, which use terms like "morally devastating" that imply the reader's in for for a thorough emotional scourging.
Well . . .
A 15-year-old youth, Michael, has a torrid months-long affair with a 36-year-old woman, Hanna. The liaison is not entirely a physical one, because almost more than anything else she enjoys it when he reads to her -- the classics, modern fiction, whatever comes to eye. Then, at an especially rocky moment in their relationship, she abruptly leaves town. He has no idea where she's gone to; but a few years later, now a law student, he attends the trial of some war criminals and recognizes Hanna among their number. It is only at this stage that he also realizes something which has been thunderingly obvious to the reader since fairly early on: that Hanna is illiterate and too ashamed to admit it. Once she's been sent off to jail for a long term, he gets into the habit of recording cassettes of himself reading stuff, so that she can enjoy great books in her cell. And then . . .
I found myself pretty unharrowed by the tale, alas. I might have been able to become more involved with characters and scenario had this been a novelette or (feasibly) novella; as it is, there seem to be longish tracts of text where nothing much is happening except the narrator's not terribly original philosophizing.
A pity.
