The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink

Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude! The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferates out of the books you read.

But behaviour does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behaviour, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.

I know that disavowal is an unusual form of betrayal. From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply exercising discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you’re doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal.

‘I… I mean … so what would you have done?’ Hanna meant it as a serious question. She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done.

“There are matters one simply cannot get drawn into, that one must distance oneself from, if the price is not life and limb.’

‘Saying “we,” “we all” is easier than saying “I,” “I alone,” isn’t it?

If Hanna’s motive was fear of exposure — why opt for the horrible exposure as a criminal over the harmless exposure as an illiterate?

Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him — do you go ahead and save him? Imagine there’s an operation, and the patient is a drug user and the drugs are incompatible with the anaesthetic, but the patient is ashamed of being an addict and does not want to tell the anaesthetist — do you talk to the anaesthetist? Imagine a trial and a defendant who will be convicted if he doesn’t admit to being left-handed — do you tell the judge what’s going on? Imagine he’s gay, and could not have committed the crime because he’s gay, but is ashamed of being gay. It isn’t a question of whether the defendant should be ashamed of being left-handed or gay — just imagine that he is.

And I had the feeling that what we were denying her was not only her wish, but her right. We had cheated her of her rights by getting divorced, and the fact that we did it together didn’t halve the guilt.

There’s no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does.

Doing history means building bridges between the past and the present, observing both banks of the river, taking an active part on both sides.

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?