It's a little hard to write about this book, it's not a big book at all, but it raises so many issues that are not commonly talked about.
In the beginning I had some sort of rejection at such a big age difference between the main character and Hannah. I hate to be a toxic douchebag, but she was old enough to be his mother and he was just a high school kid.
The question that popped into my head was, what was their relationship based on? Sex, oh sorry, love, of course an extremely deep love.
Bernhard Schlink is a German jurist and writer. He became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and has been a professor of public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany since January 2006.
But then I began to like it more, the characters were revealed and their relationships were shown. Although it's hard to call it a full disclosure again, because the narration is only from the Kid, we know nothing about Hannah herself, and about the situation through her eyes. Was she ashamed of the relationship? Or was she ashamed of herself? Perhaps she was extremely lonely, because, in fact, she was. She was afraid and ashamed of her ignorance, her actions, her past, and she knew how most people felt about it. And then a boy comes along who can give her a sublimated form of love that, if only for a moment, takes away her feelings of emptiness inside and total loneliness.
Perhaps at the very end, she really did love him, or the image of him she had created in her head. After all, she had no one else to love.
But this is my own speculation, we are not told what Hannah really felt.
Regarding the main character, probably because of the relationships within the family, the first experience of a relationship with someone like Hannah, he formed an anxious avoidant type of attachment, or maybe it only formed to Hannah herself.
It's also about how after the war we all miss care, attention and love? How people seem to be armored up inside themselves, unable to receive or give true feelings. Afraid to hurt themselves.
A book with so many taboo topics can't go by without leaving its shadow on you. I didn't read it yesterday, but it still rustles its pages in my head.
What was it like for the children of the Nazis? How to accept their own parents who had a hand in the genocide? Who tortured people by giving orders, executing them, how to live with this burden all their lives?
What is morality and what is the right way to dispense justice? Do we always have that right, and is it possible to get to the truth after many years? Or is justice only something that reassures us, those who are left to live on.
Illiteracy--whose shame is it really, and is it so shameful that it is easier to run away than to face difficulties?
And most importantly, what age difference is acceptable for love in our society?
This article was sponsored by Adam Geller
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