His son Ferdinand wants to know why he cannot show remorse. But the presence of Jorg, the ex-terrorist, has given them a duty to examine their lives and their relationships with him. They perform normal functions – cracking open bread rolls, drinking wine, saying goodnight and sleeping soundly. The Weekend proceeds almost like a stage play, with arguments going back and forth between characters who have become trapped by the past. It is the intersection between personal and political awareness, the enormity of history seen through a small aperture, that makes them so successful. Behind the seemingly plain glance backwards in time, they open up a vast excavation of German society and history.
On the surface, these novels have an elliptical, almost parable-like structure. As he grows up, he never manages to reconcile this elusive need in his own life, and remains lost, apart from everyone he knows. But the end of the story is missing, and the boy is condemned not to know the experience of returning home. Similarly, Homecoming takes up the story of a young boy sent to stay for the summer with his grandparents in Switzerland, where he comes across proofs of an old novel describing a soldier coming home from the war. Even though he is aware of a crucial piece of information that could clear her name in a war crimes trial, he cannot allow himself to defend her. But it's clear that the inheritance of the Holocaust has cast this young German into an obsession that has made him unable to express love. The book can be understood and misunderstood on so many levels. When the woman turns out to have been involved in a horrific crime against humanity during the Nazi past, he discovers that this sexual encounter has made him unfit for any conventional relationship with the world. The Reader is the story of a teenager who walks without caution into a sexual relationship with an older woman, having no idea what effect this carnal intoxication will have on him. His novels are laid out with a clarity of purpose they are a faithful reconstruction of the human predicament in which characters sway between right and wrong, between accusation and defence, taking his work to such extraordinary depth and worldwide critical acclaim.
#THE PURPOSE OF THE READER BY BERNHARD SCHLINK PROFESSIONAL#
With his professional background in law, Bernhard Schlink has always carried the precision of an advocate summing up before the court of history.
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