SOURCE: Angier, Carole. “Finding Room for Understanding.” Spectator 279, no. 8830 (25 October 1997): 54-5.

In the following review, Angier asserts that The Reader offers an interesting and engaging portrayal of post-World War II “German guilt.”

At first this seems a simple, intriguing little tale. But be warned. It does to you what history does to its characters: before you know where you are, you are faced with the most extreme, unanswerable questions, which you have to decide.

At 15 the narrator, a boy living in a postwar German town, falls in love with a 36-year-old woman. Their meetings are always the same: they shower, he reads to her, they make love. Hanna is strange and secretive and, when they quarrel, cruel. Michael has to surrender and beg her forgiveness or she will send him away. And yet she seems to need his love and approval as much as he needs hers. Finally...