"The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink

Picked this one up at the library this week...have ordered "What the Dog Saw" so will tackle that when it is available!!

Finished on the weekend.

A very good read. The book is broken up into three parts. The first part details an affair between a 15 year old boy and a 36 year old woman. Some of the details were kind of creepy...there are laws against this kind of thing!! He gets sick on the way home from school one day, she takes him in and cleans him up. He is sick in bed for several weeks, even months and returns to her flat to give her some thank-you flowers. She catches him sneaking a peak when she is putting on some stockings, one thing leads to another and the rest of the first section is their love affair. She is, in my opinion, emotionally abusive at times. He is a boy who is craving love and wants to please her. This affair affects nearly every part of his life and it lasts only one summer.

The second section is when the author is in law school and he arrives, as a spectator, at a trial for women who were guards at an Auschwitz satellite camp. This is where the book gets very good. The gal he had the love affair with is one of the defendants with a secret she want to hide at any cost. This part gives the audience lots and lots to think about. How could someone he loved so dearly, do such horrible things?

The third and final section is closer to "present-day" but also in the past. After she spends many years in prison, the author travels to meet the woman he had such a life defining experience with so long ago. What he remembers and what he sees are very different. She is now an old woman and the damage she has done to so many, hangs in the air.

A very good book. If anything, it hits home on how subsequent generations must continue to remember the holocaust.