Mostly About Stories

Machado de Assis – Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

A Brazilian and grandson of slaves, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is probably the most important Portuguese-language writer of the past two-hundred years. When I asked my director of studies for recommendations for South American literature – beyond the usual suspects – she named various people, but when she mentioned Machado and this novel specifically, she spoke with such passion that I really had no excuse not to go out and get a copy. Also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner, I read Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in the recent translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, though there is also a new Penguin translation too.

There are many reasons for having a go with this book. It is short and immensely readable thanks to its equally short chapters; it is funny; it has an interesting narrative approach; and it tells a story whose messages remain valid a hundred years later – and will remain valid, I don’t doubt, for many hundreds of years yet.

The novel is the life story of the titular Brás Cubas, written by himself from beyond the grave, where he lies festering. Being dead allows him a certain degree of perspective on his life, but this is not the dramatic perspective of, say, the dying Ivan Ilyich, who realises that his entire world was a dreadful bourgeois lie. Instead, Brás Cubas gains just enough perspective to criticise the world, but not enough to properly criticise himself. As a result, there are two layers of irony here – first Brás Cubas ironises his world, and then the author ironises Brás Cubas. And what was Brás Cubas’s life? An affair, bachelorhood, and some politics. But how wonderfully is all that story told!

Style

Let’s begin with the style. After all, it’s unmissable. Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written in a style that is self-consciously imitative of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, but with an additional “harsh, bitter sentiment” – a kind of pessimism about human nature. What I mean is that the text knows it is a text: there are chapters that ask to be deleted, chapters that ask to be inserted elsewhere, and the reader is a regular partner in Brás Cubas’s narration. He is always talking to us, advising us, telling us what we think. His preface is wonderfully short because that’s the best way to “win the sympathy of… popular opinion”, and he regularly suggests that if we don’t like the book we can simply get rid of it – “the main problem with this book is you, the reader”.

Although the story of Brás Cubas’s life is told in a fragmentary, if realist, style, these chapters are then further broken up by more philosophical ones, including a selection of our narrator’s finest aphorisms, and comments on the construction of the book itself. Not for nothing does Brás Cubas refer to his book and style as akin to “a pair of drunkards” staggering down a street. Chapters and approaches never overstay their welcome – most are no longer than a page. What is more, the style is funny. At one point a character is discoursing tediously so our narrator announces his decision to cut him off and get on with the narration.

But at the same time, within the style itself there is already a hint of the pessimism that characterises the work. Brás Cubas’s mother dies and he cannot properly mourn her because he feels an obligation to move on to a happier chapter. After another death he lists various things he saw at a funeral – “this may seem like a simple inventory, but these were actually notes I took for a sad, rather trite chapter I won’t now write”. Brás Cubas’s disdain for these things, and a certain sense that he doubts the reader is interested, means that he ends up unable to write seriously about almost anything – the style and self-consciousness of what readers apparently want all end up reinforcing his own sad self-centredness.

Worms

Brás Cubas dedicates his novel to those worms that have been enjoying his decomposing corpse, and worms are a significant image throughout the novel. They are those things that drive us and eat away at our minds – negative things, mostly, such as ambition, vanity, and greed. There are few good characters in the novel. Old friends rob our main character or else steal his money in more indirect ways. Everyone is obsessed by a good political position, and even Brás Cubas’s own family is not exempt from these things. His father has told a pleasant lie about the family’s origins so much that he has now forgotten the rather more boring truth, while even the Brás Cubas’s priestly uncle is full of pride, hoping the child will turn out to be a great and powerful member of the clergy.

Our narrator himself is in no way exempt from all this. In fact, he’s more interested in justifying himself than anything else. At several points, he mentions his theory about “windows” in one’s conscience. Put briefly, it suggests that one good deed, however small, is more than adequate for cancelling out the awkward feelings created by a bad one. Brás Cubas uses this to justify all sorts, and especially his illicit affair with a friend’s wife.

Slaves

These worms draw our attention to the essential rottenness of the world, at least as Brás Cubas sees it. Another example of that, albeit one hidden behind a few of the text’s layers, is slavery. The novel was published in about 1881, and slavery in Brazil was only abolished a few years later (!). In the text slavery is regularly present, but often only in the background. Brás Cubas describes how, as a boy of six, he would take a slave “and I would place a rope between his teeth as a bridle, climb onto his back, and then, with a stick in my hand, I would whip him and make him carry me hither and thither”. This got an “ugh” in the margins of my copy, but it gets worse.

We encounter the same slave when our narrator is an adult, and by this time the slave is a free man. Brás Cubas meets him on the street, where the former slave is busy lashing a slave of his own in broad daylight. Our narrator explains the situation thus – “it was Prudencio’s way of ridding himself of all the beatings he had received, by passing them on to someone else”. There is no moral judgement of slavery in the text, certainly not by our narrator, but with comments like these the novel makes us aware of how violence perpetuates itself, not exactly to our world’s credit.

At the same time, our heroic narrator – who is anything but – discusses his own “slavery” to love. Oh, how hard it is to have a lover! He does spend a lot of money on her, true, but nevertheless I would still say that such a situation is slightly better than being someone else’s chattel. It is a ridiculous comparison – we can’t help but notice it. And it forms another aspect of the novel’s general view of humanity as not in a particularly good state – greedy, self-centred, and ultimately cruel.

Our Heroic Narrator

Towards the end of the novel there is a chapter, not containing any words, called “How I did not become minister of state”. And indeed, aside from his romance, there’s very little that might be called a success in Brás Cubas’s life. We do not notice, perhaps, for although this story is full of a certain emptiness – the wreckage of so many disappointed ambitions – Brás Cubas’s narrative style manages to make hollow “somethings” out of so many failures to do or achieve anything. At the end, Brás Cubas is pleased that he did not, at least, have any children, “and thus did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery”.

The whole book is funny and silly, but it is still a highly pessimistic work. People live dreadful lives – the women all seem to die early, or die in poverty, or both, with their only chance at salvation being marriage to a rich man. This is easier said than done, given our hero rejects one girl because she has a lame foot. And indeed, Brás Cubas, for all his faults – at one point, he describes taking the dead to the cemetery as not unlike “taking money to the bank” – does not appear any worse, morally speaking, than the other characters. Everyone here is ambitious, and unable to show any concern for the lives of others. Why on earth were we born, our author seems to ask. Yes, if it weren’t so funny, this whole story would be rather depressing.

Conclusion – Layers of Irony

What redeems this pessimism is the feeling that that’s not all there is to Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The world he describes is cutthroat, money-driven, and incredibly petty. And he himself, for all his hindsight now that he is dead, still remains wedded to those values that he had had during his life. Only the sense that Brás Cubas does not quite understand all that he says saves him and his story. We have a feeling that Machado de Assis is hiding behind him, showing us that not all he says needs to be taken at face value, and that what drives our narrator – his vanity and the rest of it – need not drive us all. Life is more than political positions and making money and good marriages, and Brás Cubas’s own life – his bachelorhood and political failure – demonstrate that, even if he does not quite notice it himself.

Short, funny, serious, it’s well worth reading.

Our “heroic” forebears – Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians

On the very first page of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians he manages to get a date wrong. For any normal work of biography this would be a death sentence. But Eminent Victorians is not a normal work of biography – it comes to me, via the wonderful Richard Holmes, as an Oxford World’s Classic. This collection of four biographical portraits – of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon – is a brilliantly written takedown of the great mythic figures of Victorian Britain. Empire, Church, and Public School are rent asunder. We should read this book not for the facts – which, to be fair, are generally accurate – but for the feelings, for the mood. In this conflict between visions of the world – Strachey’s ironic modern view, and the earnestness of the Victorians – lies its great interest. And the prose is the most brilliant vehicle for bringing it all to us.

Introduction to the Players

Of the list – Manning, Nightingale, Arnold, and Gordon – I knew Gordon and Nightingale before I started reading. Manning was one of the most famous converts from Anglicanism, the state religion of England, to Roman Catholicism. His story centres around the finer points of religious doctrine, and the power politics of the Church. Florence Nightingale -perhaps the most famous nurse of all time – we know her particularly for her work in the Crimean War, but Strachey explores the whole of her long and rich life in his piece. Dr Arnold I should probably have known – he was a great reformer of the public school, Rugby. Gordon, Gordon of Khartoum, is one of Britain’s greatest Imperial heroes – which is perhaps not as great an honour now as it once was. Gordon’s claim to posthumous fame was dramatically dying in the Sudan while protecting British interests.

I shall go through each piece briefly, highlighting both its interest to the modern reader – after all, who cares about the finer points of Anglican doctrine? – and its sparkling prose.

Cardinal Manning

I am not entirely familiar with the finer points of church doctrine. One thing that strikes one, reading Eminent Victorians, is just how obsessed all of these people were over religion. Already by Strachey’s time one has the impression that people did not care. But back then, there were real crises of faith, real discussions – and dissentions – over baptism and all the rest of it. This Manning fellow was terrified by God from the age of four. He grew up well connected, was friends with Gladstone. “Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed with an infinite capacity for making speeches?” – what more, indeed, even today does an Englishman need? But Manning’s family ran out of money, and the ambitious young man had to settle with becoming a churchman, rather than a politician.

Anglicanism is often divided in High Church and Low Church. These two terms refer to its interpretation – are we to be closer to the Protestants, or to the Roman Catholics? The former term denotes a preference for Rome, the latter a preference for Geneva. Manning was always a High Churchman at heart, but this position always leaves one open to the temptation to go all the way – to become, in short, a Papist. This is what happens. Manning becomes convert, manipulates the workings of power at the Vatican, and raises himself through the ranks, all while continuing to be tormented by his bad conscience. At one point he appears to be on the verge of becoming pope but refuses to let his ambition get the better of him.

How strange all this reads to us, in our godless age. Not that these people were any different from us. If anything, Strachey’s account reveals that the petty power politics of the church are just the same as they are anywhere else. But their concerns seem so distant from our own. It’s hard to imagine these days the horror that swept over Europe when Papal Infallibility was affirmed and explained in 1870. But so it was. The whole piece, rather too long, is still an interesting window into another world.

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale is another one of the Eminent Victorians who was religiously insane. The popular image of her heroically giving up a life of riches and privilege to be a nurse is, to Strachey’s mind, slightly inaccurate. Instead, “A Demon possessed her”. Nightingale’s story I feel is particularly relevant to our own age, where activism often drives people to self-destruction. For she was an activist who knew no limits. She had been born into great wealth and privilege, but she also suffered from a religious mania. Strachey notes that “she could not bear to smile or to be gay, ‘because she hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of her sin’”. And so she works, and she works hard. Admittedly, “it sometimes happens that the plans of Providence are a little difficult to follow”, but with the Crimean War all was plain.

She went to the wretched hospitals of Constantinople and Crimea and fought the most deadly enemy of all – the British bureaucracy. She introduced many and serious improvements to the administration of these hospitals and cared for soldiers’ mental wellbeing just as much as for their physical one. But then we are finished with Crimea – the life we know as legend has ended, and Strachey keeps going. We learn of her tireless work back in Britain, to reform the army, then the hospitals of India, and hospitals more broadly.

We meet the great enemies of progress, such as Lord Panmure, for whom “duty was paramount; and he set himself, with a sigh of resignation, to the task of doing as little of it as he possibly could” and Ben Hawes, “a man remarkable even among civil servants for adroitness in baffling inconvenient inquires, resource in raising false issues, and, in short, a consummate command of all the arts of officially sticking in the mud”.

We learn that her great successes were not only thanks to her devotion to the cause, but also due to class. Yes, she was from the highest steps of society, and that counts for something. She may be a woman, but class can balance that out somewhat. We learn that Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, happened to have been a neighbour of her father’s in the New Forest. Nightingale was a success, but she had plenty of help.

And then there is the matter of how she treated those nearest to her. She was an invalid for much of her life, even though it barely stopped her from working the whole time. Still, she was dependent upon the help of others. Sidney Herbert, perhaps her closest friend, falls ill because of her demands of him. But she keeps demanding, and soon enough she breaks his spirit and he dies. Her friends draw away from her, but still, she keeps working. Strachey notes that “when the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplace of the moral judgement are better left unmade”. But of course, that is not the case – he knows it too.

Nightingale’s words on receiving the Order of Merit, “too kind – too kind” sum up her life. She made the mistake we all are vulnerable to, of forgetting the individual in one’s duty to the whole. Failing to care for those closest to her rather makes her drive, her “demon”, a little suspect. She did good, yes, but at what cost?

Dr Arnold

Ah, school! Dr Arnold was made headmaster of Rugby at a time when public schools like Eton or Winchester were dens of depravity and lawlessness – but still the place to be, if you wanted to make a Cabinet Minister. Arnold was as religious as the rest of our Victorians, but he had an ingenious solution to the problems of faith – he ignored them. The result was that “he soon found himself blessed with a perfect peace of mind, and a settled conviction.” In those days, “sheer force of character” was key to being a head man at a public school, those “very seats and nurseries of vice”, as Mr Bowdler, from whom we get the word Bowdlerize, described them, and Arnold certainly had something like that.

Arnold had a chance to reform public education. But in Strachey’s view, he messed up. Instead of broadening children’s minds, bringing them into contact with educated men and women, or building an enlightened community, he focused on making the school “a place of really Christian education”. School became a theocracy, “the boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race”. All this is very funny, but not what people want. Once, Arnold even makes a newspaper – “the paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone”. Strachey enjoys pointing out that these religious people have a rather poor understanding of what people actually want from life.

Even the religious-educational side of things did not really work. Arnold, who naturally preached to the children often enough, like my own dear headmaster at my old public school, managed to make something of a cult around himself. Strachey leaves the whole thing smelling of idolatry and children, not knowing better, drawn in by a strong character. Arnold failed in his reforms, and he failed to reform man himself too. Oh well. At least the piece is hilarious.

General Gordon

My favourite of the Eminent Victorians Gordon of Khartoum. How could it be otherwise? Gordon’s story reads like a curious mixture of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat. We are introduced to a wanderer in Palestine, a man with childish sincerity in his eyes and the “sunburnt brick-red complexion” of any Englishman abroad. Strachey warns us immediately that the man’s peace – he has spent the year reading the Bible and solving millennia-old riddles – will soon be broken, and he will be destroyed. Conrad here, for sure, is visible in the murky style Strachey employs – “one catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last – so it almost seems – like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe”. Yes, here is Conrad – the smallness of the individual, the unknowability of the truth, the sense of doom.

But who was Gordon? Like the others, he was a fanatic. Not for Empire, like the monstrous Cecil Rhodes, but for God. He feared His retribution, was all-too-aware of his own fallenness. But he was an adventurer and an Englishman, all the same. He fought in China, he destroyed the slave trade in Sudan (“the savage inhabitants were to become acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a government monopoly in ivory was to be established”), helped the government accidentally annex Egypt.

What one gets from Gordon’s story is a sense of the bankruptcy of Empire. Gordon is a chess piece, played among different members of the Liberal Party back in Britain – some wanting still more Empire, the others trying to leash the dogs of war. The press, too, play a role in demanding war, in puffing up Gordon, in forcing the government to let him get to work. Gordon goes to the Sudan a second, final, time, to deal with a religious rebellion that is threatening the government in Egypt. Ironically, his abolition of the slave trade helped foment this rebellion to begin with – and the only way he can put it down is by reinstating the trade. A lesser evil, he might have said. Once he is there, in Sudan, Gordon is Gordon Pasha anyway. Like Lord Jim, he has become a new person, free from the old world.

In Khartoum, Gordon is besieged. Communication lines are cut, and he has to hold out. He goes increasingly insane – no small feat, since he didn’t exactly seem normal earlier. He is convinced that Ernest Renan – the author of the ground-breaking Life of Jesus – is out in the desert, waiting for him. He continues noting down ramblings directed to God. They run out of food, morale wavers. Two days before a relief force arrives, Gordon is killed. If the government had acted sooner – and Strachey shows wonderfully the workings of government with the telling phrase “surely, firmly, completely, in the best English manner, and too late” – he would have survived. Instead, he became history.

Things work themselves out. Really, “it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring”. For the individuals like Sir Evelyn, the villain of the story, the lives of the Arabs do not matter. Indeed, nobody matters except themselves and increasing the amount of British pink upon the map. Strachey both tells the story of a heroic life, but as with all the rest, it is one that is consumed by madness of a certain sort, given up in service of something not entirely good on retrospect. But hey, it’s a cracking story.

Conclusion

One comes away from Eminent Victorians with a sense of the sheer power of these men and woman’s convictions, and the sheer irrelevance of most of them. If only they put their energies into bettering the world by our modern standards. But we should not judge them too harshly. Did they not, at least, have faith and convictions – the things most of us lack these days? They were manic, many of them, yes. But even through Strachey’s irony it is impossible to avoid the sensation that these were people who would crush us now by their sheer force of character. The Victorians may have been prudes, but they had their power. Indeed, they have it still.

For another Victorian character not spared a certain madness, I have written on Thomas Carlyle here.

A Book Without a Soul – Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader

I read The Reader, by the German author Bernhard Schlink, because – surprise, surprise – it was on my reading list. However, I’d been meaning to read it for a while. I actually bought myself a copy of the German while still at school – the book is short, and at the time I thought that I’d have plenty of time, energy, and desire to read German literature in the original language. I read the first few pages and gave up. But now my German’s better and I do, sometimes, read things in that language now, and even occasionally enjoy doing so. Still, I was in Russia, and my German copy is at home, so I read Der Vorleser in English on my Kindle to save myself time.

The Reader is the story of Michael Berg, a young man who falls in love with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz. One day she suddenly disappears, and when he meets her again it is in a courtroom, where she is being tried for working in concentration camps during the Holocaust. This forces Michael to re-evaluate their relationship and confront a kind of complicity for having loved her. As you do. Anyway, the novel forms part of the German postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) that I’ve written about elsewhere. In particular, The Reader raises questions about guilt and responsibility. How far can we blame Hanna for her actions, and all of that.

Well, let’s find out.

The Relationship – First Love

Young Michael Berg, aged just 15, gets hepatitis. He collapses vomiting on the way home from school. Luckily, however, a woman is there to help him. “When rescue came, it was almost an assault”. This woman is Hanna Schmitz, an ideal German beauty and in her thirties. When Michael recovers, after a long time in bed at home, he finds Hanna to thank her for her trouble. Except instead of just thanking her, he falls in love with her. When he sees her changing her stockings he goes red and runs away. But he comes back, and this time helps her move some coal. He gets covered in black dust and she suggests he has a bath. After the bath she puts her hands on his erection and initiates their physical relationship.

Being a modern reader who tends to value consent, this struck me as an inauspicious start to a relationship. Of course, for Michael, it’s great. The two create a ritual of showering and making love, and when he goes back to school it is with newfound confidence, because he now feels comfortable around girls. He starts skipping lessons at school to go and see Hanna, and even plans a biking holiday for them both at Easter, which they both actually end up doing. Everything seems wonderful. Michael even has the cute habit of reading her stories, mostly significant Enlightenment works by stodgy German authors. Anyway, she laps it up.

The Relationship – Dating a (literal) Nazi

Of course, things aren’t as wonderful as they seem. Michael narrates The Reader from far in the future. He already knows what will happen to their relationship, and he struggles to fully enjoy even these recollections, knowing what he eventually does about her. “Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily”. But even beyond hindsight, there’s a lot going wrong. She “took possession of [him] as a matter of course” during sex (I’m not critiquing anybody’s sexual preferences, but it’s an important point), and seems to view everything as a “power game”. The relationship quickly becomes abusive. Michael starts apologising for things he never did, taking on blame, surrendering. During their bicycle holiday, one morning she even hits him with her belt.

In some way, their relationship plays out in miniature the experience of a nation under fascism. Hanna is controlling, violent, and demands devotion. Michael gives it to her, accepting horrible conditions in the name of love (for the state). She is “single-minded” – there’s a lack of internality to her, something Adorno describes as common to the authoritarian personality type. When Michael thinks about his love for her there are lots of images of submerging, which also connects to fascism’s demands for a loss of self and identification with the state.

Moving On

One day Hanna disappears. Michael sees her while he’s out with his friends, but he doesn’t approach her. The next time he goes to her flat, he finds it empty. The aftermath of the relationship is just as nasty as the thing itself. Michael ends up sleeping with people he doesn’t love; he refuses his dying grandfather’s blessing out of an obnoxious nihilism. Hanna has left him a mess. But he does get into university, and there he studies law. One day he takes part in a seminar which involves going to a local court to watch the trial of some concentration camp guards. And it is here where we, in the second part of The Reader, meet Hanna again.

A Sham of a Court

Hanna, while they were together, never really spoke much about herself. Whenever Michael asked something she’d dismiss him – “the things you ask, kid!” – or else answer with difficulty – “it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers”. Now, at the courtroom, he learns the truth. Hanna had worked at the camps. What was more, while transferring prisoners from one camp to another as the war ended, she and her colleagues through negligence ended up killing almost all of them, for a fire broke out in the church where they were locked up for the night and the guards never opened the doors to free them.

Schlink, a professor of law in real life, introduces the reader to the challenges of retroactive justice. At first, for the students, the idea is an intellectual one. Hanna broke the law of the time, but the law was not applied to her then as a guard – does that mean she should go without punishment in the present? But this theoretical, intellectual problem becomes a personal one when Michael sees her among the defendants. However, even in the court it’s hard to feel we’re dealing with a real trial. Among the lawyers are ex-Nazis, and at one point Hanna rightly asks the judge “so what would you have done?” He can only bluster an answer. The idea that everyone in Germany is complicit in the Nazi atrocities, directly or indirectly, is a one challenging component of some postwar German thought.

When Hanna is asked why she didn’t let the prisoners go free, she says that it would have been impossible to restore order. Faced with her duty as a guard and her duty as a caring human being, she chose the former. The Reader does engage a little bit with German philosophy, old as well as new. Michael’s father is a professor of the subject, and has written on Kant and Hegel. I’m no expert on Hegel, but I know enough about Kant to say that he placed a huge amount of emphasis on doing one’s duty.

While the categorical imperative probably has an answer to the question of whether we should let prisoners die or fail at our jobs, I think there is a subtext about the inadequacy of philosophy in The Reader. Early on in the novel Michael notes that “behaviour does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided”. In reality, neither Hegel nor Kant could create a philosophical system capable of coming to terms with the questions of collective guilt and responsibility that the Holocaust raised. When Michael eventually asks his father for advice about the case, he does not get the answer he wants from him either.

The Reader and the Listener

The twist of The Reader, which is relatively obvious, is that Hanna can’t read. She ended up in court because she ignored court summonses, and she hit Michael on their bike tour because he left her a note she couldn’t understand. In the courtroom the other guards blame her for writing a report on the atrocities, and she accepts responsibility for it. It turns out she’ll do anything to avoid the shame of others learning that she can’t read. In fact, she ended up in the camps because she was avoiding the possibility of promotion at her old job, a promotion that would have exposed her illiteracy.

For Michael, this raises the question of whether her illiteracy could “be sufficient reason for her behaviour at the trial or in the camp”. He knows that he could tell the judge, saving her from getting a huge prison sentence. But he hesitates. His father tells him that it’s more important to protect her dignity, her sense of self, than to save her from prison. In the end, Michael watches her get sentenced to a far longer sentence than she perhaps deserved.

After Court

Michael’s life after graduation is a failure. He hides from the world, becoming a professor of legal history. His wife separates from him. But one day he decides to write to Hanna, or rather to read to her. He sends her recordings from various books, so that she can listen and enjoy herself at prison. She eventually learns to read by following in the books his words. Michael’s attitude towards illiteracy in some way reflects the problem of Nazism itself, and the way it took hold over the German people. “Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation”. She has come to think for herself.

The final section of The Reader I shan’t spoil here. It is difficult and morally challenging. We are not asking ourselves “who is to blame”, because that’s a relatively straightforward question. The much harder question The Reader poses is “how much are they to blame?” This is an area of uncertainty, of gradations. I don’t have a clue myself what the answers might be. But Schlink orchestrates his novel carefully, and in doing so he makes sure we ask ourselves what we think. That’s commendable, in its way.

Conclusion

The Reader is on my university reading list for the same reasons it’s often read at German schools: it’s short, it’s morally complex, it’s historically relevant. It’s not unlike those pre-made meals you can buy at the supermarket – ready to eat (or analyse), but there’s something missing when you compare them with other meals (or books). You know, it might just be that it has no soul. I know that sounds ridiculous, especially when we’re talking about a relatively engaging love story with some guilt and redemption sprinkled on top. But what I mean is that I felt the book was too short – its themes, their weight, overwhelmed the human element it tried to explore.

That’s not to say you can’t write about people’s complicity in the German past in a short novel – Grass’s Cat and Mouse does it perfectly well. But the Holocaust is perhaps a little much. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I felt the book was written for its themes, rather than its characters, or the story. And when you have that impression, it’s hard to enjoy it. The characters lose their internal energy; they seem like automatons, just advancing the themes. The feeling is in no way as bad as reading Tolstoy’s later works, but it’s similar. The Reader just feels too simple, too formulaic, in spite of its great themes. It feels like a book you read at school. I enjoyed it at the time. I even went out and bought my girlfriend a copy as soon as I finished. But it’s hardly a book I’ll revisit.