The Reader by Bernard Schlink

I have been wanting to read The Reader for some time.  It was probably on my "to read" list since I saw that the movie based on the book had been nominated for an Academy Award, which I now realize was in 2009.  I saw The Reader at a book market and remembered I had wanted to read it.  For reference, I haven't seen the film, so don't know how closely it follows the book or the extent to which it makes clear some of the matters left more obscured in the novel.


I note from the cover it is an Oprah Book Club Book.  I think this may be the first book I've read that I identified as an Oprah Book Club book.  In that regard, the book works very, very well.


The chapters are short (almost James Patterson style), so it's easy to feel like you're making progress.  The Reader deals with heavy subject matter, but to some extent feels distanced, so you appreciate the depth on reflection without it feeling too weighty while you're in the process of reading.  And it leaves open a number of questions to interpretation and assessment in a manner that would be very susceptible to discussion.


I've never been part of a book club.  Despite hinting and outright asking people I have known who are members, I tend to get deferred with the comment that they're not really about reading or discussion, but more about drinking wine.  But if I did have a book club (or if I can consider you my book club) I think The Reader would be excellent in that it combines the qualities of being easy to read while having lots of depth for discussion.  I don't know if this combination is a feature of Oprah's Book Club books, but if it is, I'll try to seek out more of them.


I've noticed at the end of some of the Lisa Scottoline books (I'm thinking of Look Again) that they have questions for book club discussion.  I'm not sure if that's helpful or not.  One of the things I really liked about The Reader is that the nature of the story and the writing prompted the questions and discussions in my own mind.  I didn't need a questionnaire to frame the questions for myself.


One of the reasons for that is that the narrator and the principal character are both very opaque in their thought processes.  Their actions are described, and occasionally the narrator reports on his motivations, but those stated motivations remain suspect and often involve leaps that are not necessarily intuitive or logical.  It begs for the reader to impute motivations and read things into the characters that may or may not be supportable by the text alone.


I'm still not sure how I feel about The Reader.  I didn't finish with the excitement or eagerness to read about the protagonist again, or the satisfaction of a mystery solved.  It had an ending sequence somewhat like Lord of the Rings which at first read seemed anticlimactic and not integral to the story, then later felt heavy handed in its allegory (though I'm still thinking about that).  So I left saying "huh".  Then started to think about it some more.  And some more.  I think I liked it, and it certainly gave me a lot to mull over.  I liked that I needed to think about it, I liked that I'm still thinking about it, and I know I want to discuss it in further detail.