SOURCE: Enright, D. J. “Modern Love.” New York Review of Books 45, no. 5 (26 March 1998): 4-5.

In the following review, Enright concludes that The Reader is a deeply troubling book in which the agonizing moral dilemmas of the Holocaust are revisited and left unresolved.

Rarely can a novel of this modest size have made such demands on its readers. The more slowly and carefully you follow the narrative [in The Reader], the more tortuous, unsettled, and uncertain or ambivalent it grows, and the more difficult to epitomize. Such, we suppose, is to be expected of what is concurrently a small, personal attempt at sustained moral accounting and a large, public one.

The opening promises a relatively simple story in an established genre, that of the education sentimentale. Michael Berg, a fifteen-year-old German schoolboy, is violently sick in the street, and “when rescue came, it was almost an assault.” (Virtually every...