5/24/2023 0 Comments The reader by bernhard schlink pdf![]() A philandering playwright is accused to infidelity by his wife in “The Night in Baden-Baden,” but he sees her accusations as nothing more than a means to exculpate himself of his guilt as he carries on with his ways. ![]() In “Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen,” a son tries to put his resentment toward his emotionally distant father behind him by proposing a trip to a Back festival but soon realizes, during his efforts to reconnect, that it wasn’t his father who was the distant one. In ”After the Season,” a man falls quickly in love with a woman he meets on the beach but wrestles with his incongruous feelings of betrayal after he learns she’s rich. Summer Lies brims with the delusions, the passions, the outbursts, and the sometimes irrational justifications people make within a mélange of beautifully rendered relationships. A keen dissection of the ways in which we play with truth and less-than-truth in our lives. R Ellis, Read onlineįrom Bernhard Schlink, the internationally best-selling author of The Reader, come seven provocative and masterfully calibrated stories. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany's pre and post-war generations, between the guilty and the innocent and between words and silence. What does it mean to love those people-parents, grandparents, even lovers-who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink's prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue and excess in any form. The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?" As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: what should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. He never learns very much about her and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. To read with insightful illiteracy, to recognize our aphasic limitations, is not merely a strategy for coming to terms with the Holocaust but an ethical necessity.Originally published in Switzerland and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading and shame in post-war Germany. The Nazi genocide of the Jews leaves a legacy of semantic abuse, yet the voice of the witness also persists, allowing us to turn linguistic breakdown into insight. Our belatedness, reading “after Auschwitz,” carries the ethical obligation to recognize the distinction between then and now, between illiteracy as inability to derive meaning from an event without context and a willful blindness that chooses to deny, between aphasia from immediate injury and aphasia from posthumous grief. Using specifically language-related terms emphasizes the difference between knowing about an event through representation and knowledge from direct personal exposure, not to detract from the limits of understanding outlined by trauma theory but to decouple the experience of trauma itself from reading about it. On the bases of discussions of Art Spiegelman's Maus and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, as well as of Charlotte Delbo's, Jean Améry's, and Primo Levy's memoirs, Fred Wander's The Seventh Well, John Felstiner's translation of Celan's Todesfuge, and Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader, this paper presents a model for reading the Holocaust structured around the ideas of “illiteracy” and “aphasia,” the opportunity to transform linguistic disability into a means of access to what seems “beyond the word.” Rather than precluding insight, verbal insufficiency serves as a form of “negative capability,” the potential to dwell in a space with no complete answers, no security, respecting the terms upon which victims of the event had to read their own experience.
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