The Reader seems to be a very old novel, so when the editorial board picked up the book, I didn't fully anticipate its contents. I can't even be sure how I feel when I read it.
But read it down and found it surprisingly smooth.
If you put aside the heavy memories of World War II, you will find that this is a story about a boy falling in love with a young woman, like the story of Rousseau and Madame Warren. A boy named Michael accidentally falls in love with Hannah, an illiterate conductor, and the two fall into a sadistic relationship that, although it ends abruptly at some point, eventually becomes entangled with each other's lives.
01 Memories twisted into a rope
If the memory of Hannah's contact is Michael's sweet memory and his painful obstacle, then the Germans after World War II are equally full of contradictions about the memories of their fathers.
And this is intertwined because of the love affair between Michael and Hannah, whether it is from the title of the novel or the setting of the characters, the two conflicts are tightly glued together, not like a bundle of rope tied with tape, but like a new rope that has been broken.
Thus the author is almost resistant to interpretation, and at the end of the book he writes:
"Write down my story with Hannah, something I decided to do shortly after her death. Since then, our story has been written many times in my mind, always different, always with new images, fragmentary plots and ideas.
So, in addition to the one I wrote down, there are many other versions. The reason I made sure I wrote the correct version was that I wrote this version and not the others. This written down version is what I want to write down, and many other versions don't want this version to exist.
I wanted to write our story at first in order to get rid of it. But memory is not mentally prepared for this purpose."
Like Michael's marriage, his plan to erase Hannah's memory of existence was also frustrated, and his efforts to condense and erase were in vain, like the heat wave of summer sticking.
"I'm trying to build a better relationship between men and women. I confess that a woman feels a little bit like Hannah and smells a little bit like Hannah so that our common life will be reliable."
Michael eventually decided to tell Hannah's story to her future female companions, each with their own reactions. But what was said dissipated. So Michael finally decided not to tell it anymore.
"Because the truth that everyone is talking about is just what everyone is doing, there is no need to tell it."
02 Why do you choose to forget?
The history of World War II is a scar, both for the Jews and for the Germans.
The sympathy of the Jews and the eternal guilt of the Germans seem naturally to become the memory of each other by the dangerous cultural heritage of the two peoples.
Just like lin's recent new book "Forget Me", Qian Xiuling, who was awarded the Hero Medal by Belgium, seems to understand that the act of saving people, even if it is great, is only a past act and memory, so she does not want others to always mention it.
But merit can be so, but sin cannot.
The author borrows Michael's mouth to express the feelings of the descendants of the Nazis for their fathers:
The accusation of those sinners does not free us from the stigma, but it can remove the suffering that arises from it. It transforms the negative pain of shame into strength, action, aggression, and therefore argues with guilty parents, and we seem energetic.
So Michael also had to face Hannah as a concentration camp guard. Should he blame Hannah? She and the other female guards did not release the Jewish women, eventually letting the fire engulf them.
Michael once accused their parents:
"All of us judged our parents to be shameful, even though we could only accuse them of tolerating the perpetrators around them and among them after 1945."
But now, Michael doesn't want to blame anyone, whether parents or Hannah, but it doesn't seem pointless to blame them.
They are snowflakes in an avalanche, and they are not innocent, but this does not mean that blaming them can liberate themselves as their offspring.
The descendants of the Nazis, trapped in the mire, dare not forget the past, and are even more confused and do not know how to face it.
Not so many people can rebel against the evil of mediocrity as decisively as Arendt, and many more accept that mediocrity and eventually leave evil as a legacy to the next generation.
This question has become a modern proposition: Can we criticize the banal evil of our fathers?
When faced with this problem, many people can still easily give the answer.
But what if this mediocre person is not his father, but his lover?
03 For the desolation of love
Michael cannot criticize Hannah's banal evil, just as a couple cannot bear to criticize the ordinaryness of their lover.
"Actually I have to blame Hannah. But to blame Hannah is to blame myself. I've loved her, and I've loved her not only. Oh I chose her too.
I tried to tell myself that when I chose her, I didn't know anything about what she was doing. I tried to convince myself that I was innocent, and that situation was tantamount to a situation where a child likes a parent.
But the love of your parents is the only love you don't have to take responsibility for."
Thus the text re-emerges the theme that was once revealed in Elliot's Wasteland: desolation
Whether it's the corpses buried in the hyacinth garden, or the sailors who drowned in the sea.
They are neither alive nor dead, but exist barrenly, just as the Germans of World War II history were after the war.
So the memory can only be there, cannot be erased, cannot be forgotten, can not be criticized and can not be told.
"Memories are preserved, just as when the train goes on, a city remains."
04 Love, security and escape
Formally the subject matter of this book is fiction, so the author does not need to solve this problem, memory there is no birth or death, evil and love together. But what confronts Hannah deeper is Michael's guilt. This is also a part of the novel that is worth analyzing
From the beginning, Michael chose to be with her young partner rather than recognize Hannah, and it was that time that Michael felt that her half-heartedness was exposed, and that hannah was less cold than insecure.
Whether it's the fact that Michael left a note to sneak out in the morning, or that he didn't recognize Hannah afterwards, these details cementEdin's despair of feelings.
Thus she constantly escapes the reality of her illiteracy, and she is not a desperate person, as can be seen from the fact that she took care of the vomiting Michael in the first place, so her occasional flashes of extreme violence and emotional indifference generally imply the trauma of her past, whether it is the extreme inferiority of her illiteracy or the pain of abandonment of lost love.
Michael actually realized that it might have been a small act of his own that made Hannah decide to flee, and was never heard from until she was once again pulled to the judgment bench by society.
Hannah's final suicide was also an escape, she learned the word, but she prejudged and did perceive that Michael's original enthusiasm for her had long since cooled down, whether it was a punishment or an escape, she finally chose to cut herself off.
Thus came Michael's last monologue:
"In the blink of an eye, ten years have passed. In the first few years of Hannah's death, the old questions tormented me all the time: whether I had rejected and betrayed her, whether I had been responsible to her, whether I had sinned because I had loved her, whether I should have announced my disassociation from her or got rid of her, and how I had done so.
Sometimes I ask myself if I am responsible for her suicide. And sometimes, I'm angry at her and what she's brought me. Until this atmosphere becomes weak, those questions become less important. What I did and what I didn't do and what she brought me – and now it's all my life."
At this point, the picky one will inevitably feel that Michael is caught in a kind of nothingness. He refused to deal with his life and memories, and eventually chose to leave it barren.
But for the Germanic descendants, this treatment of second-generation memory is inevitably one way.