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Popular Culture Review
executed for her protection of a young Jewish woman. The themes of
redemption and deliverance involve many of the Guernsey Islanders as they tell
how they have raised Kit and how the child’s life has given them a renewed
sense of purpose. At the end of the novel, the impending marriage of Juliet and
Dawsey—and their adoption of Kit—completes the cycle of rebirth and
generation. Amid references to Jane Austen, Balzac, Mark Twain, and Leigh
Hunt, this novel reminds us about the meaning of literature—still one of the
truest representations of humanity, soul, and self. In short, the reading of
literature may be the only means, when the world has gone awry, that helps
humankind continue to persevere over adversity and evil. The continued
popularity of these themes attracts contemporary readers who want to
understand the past in contemporary terms, making sense of the dangers and
horrors of extraordinary times.
The Reader
Its popularity fueled by the recent movie with the same name, Bernhard
Schlink’s The Reader is a short, three-part novel of great depth, complexity, and
moral anguish. It generates a kaleidoscope of emotions about the self-absorbed
reactions to WWII from the second generation of Germans. The first part of this
austere 1995 novel is set in an unnamed German city about twenty years after
the end of the Second World War. Michael Berg, a fifteen-year-old student,
encounters Hanna Schmitz, a woman in her mid-thirties, when he becomes
suddenly ill with hepatitis. During his convalescence, Michael becomes
obsessed with Hanna, and so returns to her apartment to thank her for her help.
From that encounter, Michael and Hanna begin a brief, intense, passionate affair
that ultimately consumes Michael’s life—both as an adolescent and as an adult.
The atmosphere and tone of this first section, reflected in the “here and
now memoir” and in the older Berg’s recollection of the time, is of a nameless,
colorless, emotionless city. Early dreams of a building by the train station depict
a dead world, dusty with blind windows, reflecting the post-war world with a
stark, anonymous, colorless existence. Michael’s struggle with self-control
reflects the post-war German psyche and his father’s scholarly pursuits as an
academic philosopher. The heritage of the eighteenth-century German romantic,
Sturm und Drang era is evident in the duality of Michael’s interior monologue;
it also reflects his reading to Hanna about Hegelian dialectics:
“Events back then were part of a life-long pattern in which thinking and
doing have either come together or failed to come together” ( 20)
“Precisely because she was both close and removed in such an easy
way, I didn’t want to visit her.” (93)
The act of reading is central to The Reader, but it is very different from
the reading in the Guernsey novel. In the latter, characters react strongly, even