SOURCE: Mundy, Toby. “The Terrible Secret of the Older Woman.” New Statesman 127, no. 4637 (9 January 1998): 44.

In the following review, Mundy lauds Schlink's depiction of the German consciousness in The Reader, noting that the novel “reminds us of the ghostly immanence of the Nazi past in every aspect of postwar Germany.”

“If only it were all so simple!”, Solzhenitsyn once wrote. “If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Bernard Schlink's magnificent chiaroscuro novel The Reader grapples with the legacy of those who carried out the Final Solution to tackle head on Solzhenitsyn's discomforting question.

Told in part as a rite-of-passage tale, in part as...