The Reader

by Bernhard Schlink

Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.

The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.

‘And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal’.