Schlink's first-person narrator, is studying law.
Then Hanna disappears.Ī few years later, Michael, who is Mr.
The boy and the woman, who is a 36-year-old streetcar conductor named Hanna Schmitz, have an erotic liaison that consumes Michael but also pushes him toward a self-confident manhood. He is helped by a stranger on the street, and months later, when he returns to her house to thank her, he finds himself in the throes and raptures of his first sexual stirrings. A 15-year-old boy named Michael Berg, born in Germany during the war, becomes sick on his way home from school one day. The story, seamlessly translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway, is simple. In the end, one is both moved and disturbed, saddened and confused, and, above all, powerfully affected by a tale that seems to bear with it the weight of truth. What starts out as a story of sexual awakening, something that Colette might have written, a ''Cherie and the Last of Cherie'' set in Germany after the war, is suddenly darkened by history and tragic secrets.
Schlink blends the themes of love and law, guilt and absolution around the relationship of a young man and an older woman. Just when it would seem that everything has been said about Germany and the war, there comes this arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex book by Bernhard Schlink, a judge in Berlin and a writer of mystery stories unknown until now in the United States.
0 kommentar(er)
