SOURCE: Cheyette, Bryan. “The Past as Palimpsest.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4939 (28 November 1997): 23.

In the following review, Cheyette offers a generally positive assessment of The Reader, but asserts that the novel's evocation of Jewish victimhood is inadequate.

At one point in The Reader, the book's narrator, Michael Berg, fears that he has descended into platitude. Berg, at the age of sixteen, has fallen in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. The sentimental version of boyish sexual awakening (sometimes with an older woman) is a staple of Hollywood cinema, though it also informs much serious nineteenth-century European literature. As he looks back on his intense affair with Hanna, after a thirty-year gap, Berg is aware that his memories have been undermined by “fantasized images”. Later on, he calls on “reality” to “drive out the clichés”. What makes this novel so compelling is precisely the quality...