A Book a Week - The Reader

Book Seven of the Book a Week Quest

The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink, 1995

Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway

First off, I didn't see the movie yet (this is my worst year in year in terms of seeing Oscar-nominated films...I've only seen two of the five Best Picture nominees).  So I have nothing to compare it to.

That being said, it won't take much for the movie to be better than the book.  

The story here was fine - a fifteen-year-old boy falls in love with an older woman and they begin a torrid love affair.  Years later (after they have since broken up), his former lover is on trial for crimes she committed at a Nazi concentration camp.  Not much to it.  A little odd, but it might have worked if the author was able to tell the tale in a more interesting way.

Don't get me wrong...I am all for books that have short chapters.  They're a way to keep me reading on.  The next chapter's only six pages...sure, I'll read it before I turn off the light.  However, in The Reader, the chapters were literally only 3 pages long (and the book is tiny, the font is big, and the spacing seems larger than normal).  Just when you thought the author was getting somewhere, the chapter ended and he started on another tangent.  When your chapters are short as these are and then you fill these chapters with descriptions of buildings or people that are really trivial to the grand scheme of the story, you lose me.

Now, it's entirely possible that the English translation is what killed the story here, but I'm sure that the chapters were still short in the German version, so I'm not placing all (or even most) of the blame on the translation.

I will say that despite my problems with it, I was able to pull one quote out of the book that stood out to me...I don't know why, but after I read it, I read it again, and then again.  

Is there no such thing as "too late"? Is there only "late," and is "late" always better than "never"?  

For some reason, that one stuck with me.

I can see why this was an Oprah Book Club selection (my first in that prestigious *pause for laughs* club).  Very melodramatic.  Oprah strikes me as someone who would fall head over heels for a romance between a female Nazi and a teenage boy...As I type that sentence I'm actually not sure whether I was trying to be funny or not.  Was I going for irony there?  Really...why in the heck would Oprah have chosen this as a book club selection?  She must've seen something there...but I sure didn't.