As perhaps regular readers here will notice, I am trying to get back to reviewing books that I recently read. For some reason, I went a surprisingly long time without doing any real book reviews, or at least not many that I can remember. It felt like I was backed up and had too many to try and catch up. Even worse, I realized that my memory for some was not quite as strong as it should have been, requiring me to revisit some of these books.
So in an attempt to remedy this, there are some more recent posts with reviews of books that I have just finished reading. One of them was an audiobook by Teresa Meteo, which I very much enjoyed.
Here is another one. This is a more conventional one, because it is printed in black and white, an actual, physical book.
As I approached the midway point of this book, it was hard not to notice that this story somehow felt familiar. Then I remembered that, at some point, I must have watched the movie version.
While I had indeed seen the movie before, it had been a long time. Like maybe over ten years, even. Could be wrong, but if memory serves correctly, I may even have seen it in a movie theater back when it was still playing. So I was only dimly aware of what happened, and what was going on.
Now, before I get into more specifics, as usual, I will warn about spoilers. Just like with movies, if you are unfamiliar with this book but intend to read it in the future, and do not want any spoilers, you should stop reading now.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Okay, so this is your last shot. If you are still reading now, I have to imagine that you either have read this book before, or that you do not mind spoilers, because there will be spoilers from here on out. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.
Here goes:
This was a good book. It is a short read, and you can probably get through it in a day or two, if you want to. Possibly, you may even be able to read it in one sitting, although that would take a number of hours. Generally speaking, I do not read that fast, nor do I even really like to read that fast. Maybe it’s just me, but there is something to sitting and relaxing and reading at a slower pace, and not allowing something as personal and pleasurable as reading to be yet another thing that we try and rush through.
In any case, despite being a short book, there are a lot of themes and issues being juggled here. That is a sign of a good book or story, especially when it is short like this. But we get a coming of age romance story between an awkward teenage kid and a mysterious older woman. We get a trial, and then a rather astonishing revelation, which dawns slowly but surely on the author, that the reason that this woman wanted to be read to all of the time was that she herself could not read. The trial itself, and the thoughts of the author, examine the relationship with the past crimes of the Holocaust which for the very next generation of Germans, who had mixed emotions and some hypocrisy when wanting to both to reveal the crimes of the past, while also understanding that those guilty still were very much among them, and very much part of the West German state in which they lived.
As for the author himself, he of course has fallen in love with Hanna, the mysterious woman. And while he realized only much later that she has been illiterate all of this time, this happens only when her pride simply cannot permit admitting to the entire world that she does not know how to read. Ultimately, she is forced to basically take the brunt of responsibility for a war crime that happened right at the end of the war. While she was hardly in a high ranking position or command, the court effectively makes her the convenient scapegoat, and she is punished especially harshly, while the other defendants basically get away with their role in this crime.
The author feels something is incomplete regarding Hanna. He feels that he has betrayed her in some essential manner. Now that she is behind bars in prison, he decides to try and help her, even after years have passed. So he begins to record his own voice reading books, and sends her a cassette tape player and regularly sends her cassettes of written works. Later, we find that she has used these tapes in large part to teach herself how to read. There is clear admiration for how difficult it must have been for her, and how brave she was to make that happen at her age. We see that Hanna was really trying to improve herself.
We then examine the question of what Germans guilty of crimes against Jews can do. Hanna immediately acquired as many books about the Holocaust and the camps (she herself worked at Auschwitz) as possible, trying to educate herself, to understand what she herself participated in. How much of all of this she understood at the time when she participated in it is not entirely clear, but she does at least seem to be trying to understand it and, ultimately, trying not only to come to terms with it, but to make up for it to the degree possible.
But can anything make up for it? The people – particularly the Jews – who had their lives completely turned upside down during this time, are they obliged to find the heart to forgive the perpetrators, the people who made their lives a living hell? It does not happen in this book, where one Jew who survived the very horrors that Hanna was a part of.
So this is a great book that makes the reader think about important questions. Plus, it does so with an accessible approach and an entertaining story to boot. There are interesting, compelling characters faced with situations where they are uncertain about how to react, and their decisions force yet still more uncertain situations that they have to make decisions for.
Ultimately, it is, after all is stripped down, a love story. But an unconventional love story. True, this one takes place in Europe, as many romances do. Yet, this is not a romantic story of some dreamy characters who have a hot romance in some beautiful city like Paris or Rome or Venice, or some charming hamlet in rural Britain, where a happy ending seems like a foregone conclusion. This book is not romantic fluff. Everything here feels grim and gray and all too real, and the characters flawed, often exacerbating their own problems in their fixation on temporary escapes, and these in turn impact other people.
This leads to another question that the author poses: are we not responsible for the people we fall in love with. An interesting question, and one that he does feel confident answering. Yes, he says, we are responsible for who we choose to fall in love with. Of course, he had not known at the time that Hanna, the object of his affections, had been involved in such horrendous crimes. How could he know? After all, she has kept this a very rigid secret for a very long time. And as it turns out, her entire involvement in these crimes, the author eventually works out, were a quite direct result of her going to extraordinary lengths to keep the other, arguably even bigger, secret: that she is illiterate.
That does not fully exonerate the author, either, though. He actually keeps his relationship with Hanna a secret, both as it happens, and then after the fact. And as the book goes on, he goes to more and more extraordinary lengths himself to keep this whole relationship a secret, right to the end. He has carried around a sense of guilt about Hanna, feeling that he has wronged her in some key, fundamental way, even though he cannot quite put a finger on how specifically he did this. At times, he pushes these thoughts away, especially when he blames Hanna for his own wounds of lost intimacy and love. However, this guilt keeps coming back, like a bad penny. And the two lovers also seem unable to completely remove one another from each other's lives. They keep turning up, finding one another.
Indeed, both of the two main characters go to extraordinary lengths to keep their secrets. In fact, it is the driving force of the book. The author finds Hanna very attractively mysterious at first. Slowly but surely, however, he begins to uncover Hanna's most closely guarded secret, in large part due to the revelations of another secretive aspect of her past life that she, rather surprisingly, is now only too open and frank about: her role in the crimes during the Holocaust. Meanwhile, he has to deal with the consequences of his own secrets, which impact Hanna a great deal. His knowledge of her illiteracy could possibly alter the court's understanding of her role in the crime and possible - even likely - save her from being the scapegoat, the single person held responsible for what are, in fact, the actions of a number of people. It is his understanding that grows as to the lengths that she goes to even in court, even when on trial for her life, to keep this a secret, because she feels far more shame in never having learned to read than in what she actually participated in during the war.
The final irony in this book is that both Hanna and the author alter their perceptions of all of this, of everything, right at the end. Hanna, through sheer determination and hard work, finally learns to read and write while in jail. She has to reveal her shameful secret first to the warden, but this proves instrumental, ultimately, in her learning to read and write. And as it turns out, exorcising this particular demon allows her - perhaps forces her is a better way of putting it - to more fully understand and confront her role in the other big secret in her life, which is no longer a secret, but which is still nevertheless misunderstood. The outside world now views Hanna as a monster, even though she is apparently well-liked within the prison itself. This is due to her being the convenient scapegoat, so that no closer, more substantive examination of the wider questions of guilt among many, many more people, including the other female guards, as well as the villagers, who could conceivably have helped save the prisoners. Instead of truly scrutinizing the role of all of these people (and symbolically, of Germans as a whole), it is easier to blame one person, and that one person is Hanna. Yet paradoxically, while Hanna did not play the leading role that she is now officially condemned for, she confronts her own guilt while in prison. We learn that the very first books that she obtained once she knew how to read all had to do with concentration camps and the Holocaust. Too late, she finally wrestles these demons, and tries to do something to right a wrong that cannot be righted. Everything that she does, in the end, feels woefully inadequate. Still, it feels like the author feels that there is something to be admired in her efforts.
Meanwhile, the author himself has not been able to confront his own secrets as starkly and nakedly as Hanna, the object of his affection has. He maybe could have saved her, and given the court, and indeed the world, a better understanding of Hanna, and why she seemed so willing to take the brunt of the guilt. Yet he did not do so, and is haunted by this. But he does begin to send her the cassette tapes of his reading of books. As it turns out, he is the only person who really even tries to reach her. Her life has become largely friendless, even while she maintains a rather rigid dignity through it all. But as she learns to read and exorcises her biggest demon, ironically, she loosens her own incredible self-discipline. We learn that, in the end, she no longer takes care of herself, keeping a trim figure and bathing religiously. This pains the author, who in the end, has to admit that despite his best efforts to distance himself from Hanna, she is in fact the love of his life. Regardless of her role in the Holocaust, and how she was not who he thought she was during their time together, he has loved her through all of these years. His writing of this book is, in some sense, both a tribute to her, as well as a personal confession of sorts. It is his attempt to follow in Hanna's footsteps and finally exorcise his own demon, his own guilt, even if it is more distant and nuanced than Hanna's.
Hanna seems to symbolize the old Germany of the Nazi era, including the guilt of war crimes. She is extremely well-disciplined, to a fault, really. And she remains inaccessible to the outside world. Yet the author, who symbolizes the "new Germany," if you will, loves her. There are all sorts of paradoxes in this, since he fluctuates between wanting to expose her - at several different points in the story, and also in very different ways - all while ironically hiding his own complicity, his love for her, which he himself seems to try and almost keep this a secret from himself.
An excellent book, and highly recommended!
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