Bernhard Schlink
The story takes place in Germany, where Michael, then 15, becomes jaundiced on his way to school and is found and nursed by Hanna, 36, who is a year older than him. They eventually become romantics, but for some reason Hanna invites the protagonist to read some books to her. One of the books, Odysseus, is estimated to have taken place in the 1200s BC, during the time of the Trojan War and the Mycenaean civilization. In the eighth century BCE, Homerosu put together a collection of stories based on the 400 years of Trojan warfare that had been handed down by “oral tradition”. (The Iliad and Odysseas )
The protagonist, born after the Second World War, reads this lore and facts for Hannah.
Hanna has many secrets and suddenly disappears from his sight. The protagonist cannot accept her loss but forgets about it. The year is 1960 and the world is in the throes of a student movement.
He is now a university student. While attending a seminar on the trial of Nazi war criminals, he finds himself standing in front of
Hanna, whom he had once loved.
She was a prison guard in a concentration camp.
As the trial progressed, the hero remembered that Hanna had asked him to read a book. As he watched her trial, the protagonist realised that Hanna was illiterate. She couldn’t read and had moved from one job to another before it became known that she couldn’t read.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she was a Roma from Romania. In front of the print that she could not read, she opened the door to the world only with his voice. She immersed herself in the warmth of his skin and the world that his voice took her to, knowing that one day she would meet her fate. The trial is a life sentence against her, without her realising that she is illiterate.
In the trial of the concentration camp officials, the key question was whether they had intended to kill her or not, but it was recorded that Hannah had read books to the prisoners. At that point, it was false.
Michaela was unable to love another woman, even though she had long since forgotten Hanna.
He has been in contact with his father, a professor of philosophy, about Hannah. Finally, Hanna is pardoned, but thanks to the help of the protagonist, she is able to write, and after.
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When “The Reader” became popular, many felt disgusted by the romance between a 15-year-old and a 36-year-old.
Judging them only by their age and their bodies, they called the love of another person, even if it was fiction, freaky.
People are equal in soul if you take off their skin, but they don’t care about that. But they don’t understand what it means to be separated by age. Could they have expressed the intertwining of the protagonist, who had never heard of this war, and the woman whose job was to be judged by the world? At a time when people assumed that people who were like war criminals were evil, there was nothing but love between two people who did not know each other’s position. I don’t dwell too much on the “Nazis”. It is a story of love.
The fictional world, which incorporates reality, allows us to write about love, slipping past the arguments that cannot be conceded in the real world.
Only in stories can the possibility of love be described in the midst of all the hatred.
An American writer once told me that writers can hear the voices of their characters in their heads. The written world is unique, without sound, time or color. It is up to the writer to decide what kind of loneliness and emotion he or she feels within it, but for the writer, publication is just a voice.
In the hands of the reader, he or she constructs a third world out of the world of the novel, and begins to understand his or her own novel. And they wonder. And they wonder. I want a reader. (Perhaps a film adaptation would be the most desirable these days.
I hadn’t looked very carefully, but when I found a reader, the world opened up to me.
Her beloved Michaela had a future to live up to in the famous words of the Odyssey. Hannah is not given such a thing. The author’s choice of this classic has many implications.
Every human being has a monologue. Her life was one in which she was never allowed to have hope again.
The reading from him, temporarily young, was a new world, his own monologue.
He must have been a spokesman for her.
The author’s choice of the classic “The Odyssey” has many implications: it shows that even among those who must be judged, there is love. Only a novel can do this. There is no other reality in which you can write about unforgivable love in a fictional world and say publicly that even war criminals had love.
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The film title, oddly enough, was Japanese: ” 愛を読む人”.
The love formed by a voice disappears the fastest. The love formed by the voice fades away the fastest. Of the five senses, it is the voice that we lose first in memory. Next comes sight, touch, taste and smell.
Michael sent a tape he had recorded again for Hanna. With “The Odyssey”.
But he didn’t sound the same as he did then. She did not recognise his love.
She didn’t recognize it as his love, but as a voice that was trying to rehabilitate her.
I thought it was Hannah’s impulse to commit suicide.
Perhaps. The voice of the young man she loved had disappeared.
.
Who was the reader of the Holocaust?
The new reader for her was not the man she loved.
If there had been no war, we would have been souls of the same age and background. And yet it was a sad story of division. But judgement cannot divide us from love. Even if we are torn apart, the past, in which his voice lived, lives on, even if it disappears from our memories.
Love” remained as a residue.
＊about Obysseus quote: This is a sentence from Odysseus and is not mentioned in the novel.*
