healthy outlook on life. On an October day in the nineteen sixties, walking back
home from school, he feels so sick he has to throw up. A woman, living nearby,
sees everything and comes out to help him. An act of kindness. She takes him
in to clean him, scrubs the street where he threw up and walks him home. In
February, when finally he is able to leave the house again (he suffered from
jaundice), he buys a bouquet of flowers from his pocket money and goes to
thank her personally.
She invites him in, and they chat for a little bit. She tells him she will walk him
home again since she has to go in the same direction for an unspecified
errand. She just needs to change. She goes to her bedroom and strips before
putting on another set of clothes. The door is ajar and Michael is mesmerized.
This thirty-something woman is so different from all the adolescent girls in his
class. She is so womanly.
What follows is as logical as it is brash: he falls in love with her and they start a
relationship. Since the story is told from Michael’s prospective, we cannot be
sure what she feels or thinks about Michael: we only know her actions. Their
‘romance’ in described in that tingly fluttering ‘butterflies-in-the-stomach’ sort of
prose that only a fifteen year old in love could come up with. Everything is as
rosy as can be. She teaches him about the pleasures of the body. In return he
is asked to read stories to her. She loves being read to.
The story changes when we are told that one day, the woman has gone,
without saying a word to Michael. She has probably moved to another town, but
in any case, her house is not her house anymore and Michael is completely
baffled. In his innocence he thought that everything was perfectly alright. To
make matters worse for him, he cannot tell anyone since he had never told
anyone about the relationship either.
Michael grows up and becomes a law student. For his study, he is asked to
report on different processes against alleged World War II criminals. And,
unexpectedly, he sees her again. Spoilers ahead! She is being charged with
being part of the personnel of a concentration camp and subsequent actions of
horror carried out in that profession. Michael’s first love and tender youth
become inexplicably entwined with the history of his country and events that
have taken place before he was even born. The woman he loved, and
supposedly loved him too, until the day she vanished, here is exposed to have
a past darker than anything he could have ever imagined. Does that make her
a different woman? Does that make her unacceptable?
This book sheds some light on a very difficult part of history of any country that
has lost in a war: the fact that though everyone should move on, this is almost
impossible. In the case of Germany under the Nazi-regime, the regime forced
people to work for them, even in concentration camps. There are all sorts of
sticky questions that are raised by the aftermath of this war; not all people were
war-heroes, but does that mean that those who were not are automatically
guilty of war-crimes?
Schlink shows us that these problems even exist for people that have been
born years after the war has ended: Michael has nothing at all to do with the
war but it still becomes a big part of his (emotional) life, since the woman he
has had a relationship with is apparently guilty of war-crimes.
Schlink is a master at keeping everything in this book very light, despite (or
maybe, because of) its subject matter. The story-telling is straightforward and
clear, the wording and phrasing simple and eloquent. He has a gift of touching
upon subject ever so lightly just to make them barely visible; it is left up the
reader to gauge the murky depths of everything Michael touches upon.
