Montaigne, "Des menteurs"

An essay ("On liars") by this French writer.  You can read the original here.

There is no man whom speaking from memory pleases less than me; therein I recognize but traces of myself. And yet I think there cannot be in all the world a memory as marvelously treacherous as mine own. All my other faculties may be vile and common, but in memory I believe myself to be singular, so rare and worthy of gaining both name and reputation.

In addition to this natural disadvantage I suffer (for certainly, given its necessity, Plato was right to deem memory a great and powerful goddess), there is another: when one says in my country that a man has no sense, one says he has no memory. And when I lament the failure of my own memory, I am not believed and instead rebuked as if I were accusing myself of senselessness. These parties see no choice between memory and understanding, which would truly worsen my state of affairs. But they do me an injustice because experience has demonstrated precisely the opposite: namely, excellent memories conjoined with foolish judgments. Here also they do me an injustice – I who know nothing as well as being a friend – whereby the same words that accuse me of infirmity represent ingratitude. They discount and mistrust my affection owing to my memory and contort my natural shortcoming into a shortcoming of conscience. "He has forgotten," they say, "this prayer or that vow"; "he no longer remembers his friends"; "he never remembers to say, or to do, or not to mention this or that for my sake." Certainly it is easy for me to forget. But to neglect a task given to me by a friend, this I do not do. May my own misery be enough without my being accused of malice, as malice is just as much the enemy of my own humor.          

To some extent I am able to console myself. Firstly because my poor memory is an evil whose primary purpose is to correct a greater evil that would have easily arisen within me: namely, ambition, an unbearable shortcoming for those wishing to conduct public affairs. As in many similar examples in its development, nature has fortified all other faculties in me to the same extent that it has diminished memory. Otherwise, if the inventions and opinions of others had been summoned by my memory, I might have easily reposed my mind and judgment, without letting them exert their full powers, upon these alien reports. My speech may even be more concise, as the storehouse of memory is surely more stocked with material than that of invention. And if invention had kept me supplied, I would have deafened all my friends with my babble – deafened with subjects which excited my own faculty of their manipulation and employment, as well as animated and guided my discourse – and yet examples from some of my close friends will show what a pity this all is. As their memories furnish them with present and whole landscapes, they start their narratives so far back and embed them with so many extenuating circumstances that, if a story is good, it will be stuffed with goodness, and if it isn't, you will condemn the vitality of their memory or lament their decidedly poor judgment. And it is no small feat to cease a story when it is well along its way, for in no one action does one recognize the power of a horse as in a round and sudden stop.

Even among those who remain pertinent, I see that they wish to but cannot undo their course. And while they search for a fine point at which to halt, they end up traipsing about wobbly-legged in force and speech. Old men are the most dangerous, for in them remains the remembrance of things past even if they lack any memory of how often they have retold these events. I have seen some very pleasant stories become dull and irritating on the lips of a gentleman because each member of his audience had been gorged on the tale a hundred times over. Secondly, I remember fewer offenses endured over the years, as the old man might say. Nevertheless, I would need a protocol of offenses like that of Darius who, so as not to forget the offenses he suffered from the Athenians, made a page sing thrice in his ear each time he sat down to eat, "Sire, remember the Athenians." And yet, the places and books that I see again still smile at me with a new freshness.    

It is not without reason that we say that he who does not consider his memory to be strong enough should not try his luck as a liar. I know full well that grammarians differentiate between telling an untruth and lying. Telling an untruth, they aver, is to say something false which we have taken to be true; whereas the definition of the word "to lie" in Latin (mentire, from which our French mentir stems) seems more akin to going against our own conscience. Consequently, I only wish to speak about those who say things contrary to what they know to be true. These here either wholly invent the untruths, or they disguise and alter a veracious source. In the case of the latter, they often find that once they have made their replacements, it becomes uncomfortable to undo them because the thing the way it really is remains lodged in their memory, impressed by means of knowledge and science. And here it becomes difficult for the truth not to manifest itself to their imagination, at once dislodging the falsehood, which could never have so firm or serene a foothold, as well as evoking the circumstances of its initial acquisition. And all this flows into and obliges the mind to lose the the false and bastardized pieces it has concocted.

As for the stories they wholly invent, in as much as there is no impression to the contrary that will rattle their falseness, they seem to have far fewer fears of mistelling a story. And yet even these creations, since they are vain bodies without hold, will soon elude the memory if not well secured. Of these matters I have had pleasant experiences at the expense of those who profess to speak in no way other than what serves them best in their business, and what pleases the high-and-mighty people to whom they are uttered. Since these circumstances in which they seek to enslave their faith and their conscience may be subjected to many a change, their words will always need to vary. And so they may come to the same object and say to one man one thing and to another man another, to wit, that sometimes this object is gray and other times yellow. And if by chance these men report to one another their so opposite instructions, what shall become of this fine art? Moreover it must often happen that they imprudently defeat themselves; for what memory could endure so many memories in so many diverse forms, all forged from the same subject? I have seen many in my time desiring the reputation of this lovely type of wisdom. What they do not see, however, is that if their reputation is already abroad, there can no longer be any effect.     

So in truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor are we linked to one another if not by words. If we knew the horror and gravity of such lies, we would pursue them with flames more justly than other crimes. It seems to me that we find common amusement in chastising children for innocent mistakes, very poorly chosen, and that we torment them for capricious acts which have neither impression nor import. Whereas, in my opinion, only lying, and a notch below, obstinacy, should be combated in children at every instance from birth to development for they grow with them. And once we have granted their tongue false reins, it is amazing to see how impossible they are to retract. Hence we may see otherwise honest men who to this vice are subjects and slaves. I know a good tailor's lad whom I have never once heard speak the truth, simply because it has never been to his advantage.

If like truth, mistruth had but one face, we would be on better terms, for we would take for granted the opposite of what the liar would say. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand countenances and an indefinite playing field. The Pythagoreans make the good certain and finite, and evil infinite and uncertain. A thousand routes to miss the bull's-eye and only one to hit it. I am not sure that I would be able to safeguard my well-being from evident and extreme danger through effrontery and solemn untruth.

An ancient father says that we are better off the in the company of a dog we know than in the company of a man whose language we do not understand. As Pliny states, Ut externus alieno non sit hominis vice – a stranger cannot be said to take the place of a man. So how much less sociable than silence is false language?

King Francis I boasted of having trapped in this way Francesco Taverna, ambassador of Francesco Sforza Duke of Milan, a man very famous in the art of parlour verbiage. He had been dispatched to offer his master's pardons to His Majesty regarding a matter of great consequence. So as to maintain some intelligence sources in Italy from where He was most recently driven, and especially with the Duke of Milan, the King had advised a Gentleman to stay close to the Duke on His behalf. This Gentleman became in effect an ambassador, but in appearance was merely a private citizen who pretended to be there to see to his own personal affairs, whereas the Duke, who depended much more on the Emperor (mostly because at the time he was in a contract of marriage with his niece, daughter of the King of Denmark and present dowager of Lorraine) could not disclose any practice or conference with us without his own great interest. For this commission a Milanese Gentleman by the name of Merveille, and equerry to the King, was found. He was dispatched with some private credentials and ambassadorial instructions, and with other letters of recommendation to the Duke regarding his own private affairs for the mask and show of business. 

In fact, he remained so long with the Duke that the Emperor began to experience a certain amount of suspicion, which led to what occurred subsequently as we might surmise. It happened that, under the guise of murder, the Duke had his trial completed in two days and his head cut off in the middle of the night. Signor Francesco came, however, with a long and counterfeit conclusion about this story, since the King had already addressed His queries to all the Princes of Christianity and to the Duke himself, had His audience with His morning counsel, and was lobbying for His own cause and had raised to this end many plausible justifications. Firstly, his master had never taken our man Merveille for anything less than a private gentleman and this subject, who had come to Milan to conduct business, had never lived under a different guise. Secondly, he disavowed even having known that he had been part of the King's household, nor having known of him to begin with, so that He took him for an ambassador. The King for his part pressed on with various objections and demands and burdened him from every side; finally He got him on the matter of the execution's having been carried out at night, and whether it had been committed in stealth. To which the poor, embarrassed man responded so as to be honest as well as out of respect for His Majesty that the Duke would have been very troubled if the execution had taken place during the day. Anyone could think how he was perceived having been so brutally cut down alongside the nostril of someone like King Francis.

Pope Julius II, having sent an ambassador to the King of England to rouse him against King Francis, the ambassador having heard his duties, and the King of England having delayed his response owing to the difficulties he encountered in preparing what he required to combat such a powerful King, alleged various reasons for this last problem. And the ambassador did not respond well to the matter, saying that he had also considered for his part the same difficulties, and had mentioned all of them to the Pope. From these words so distant from his proposal, which would have been to drive him headlong into war, the King of England found the first argument for that which he would discover later, namely that this ambassador in his private intentions depended on the French side and had revealed his master. His possessions were confiscated and he narrowly escaped losing his life as well.

Khodasevich, "Когда б я долго жил на свете"

A work ("Were I to live long on this earth") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Were I to live long on this earth,
Then at the end of all my days   
Deception's web would snap its girth      
O'er my sad conscience and its maze. 

And yet what disillusion looms,
(For happiness I long have pined!) 
When life an eerie chill assumes,
That ever parts my hair and time?

Thus shut my eyes, and silence gains,
And good is secret life's warm light.
And in the sky my breath restrains 
My almost free soul in its plight.

Fear me not

It's about time I had a little secret to keep from her.

                                                                                                          Mikael Neumann

I have only one minor objection regarding this film, and that concerns the way in which a daughter ultimately discovers the 'truth' about her father. Surely the screenwriters could have thought a wee longer about this one (I couldn't help but stare gobsmacked at the screen as it unfolded). What happens after that revelation, which is, in keeping with good cinematic principles, not a revelation to a viewer of Fear me not, may disappoint those who tend to expect a film of suspense to devolve into a preposterous string of action scenes far beyond the physical capabilities of average citizens. No, the film hints in many directions, but proceeds down a consistent and straight path, and pays off in a most likely manner. All of which, of course, will strike that same disappointed crowd as unlikely. 

We begin one blue northern evening with a lean, middle-aged male inhaling smoke off the veranda of a rather fabulous lakeside house. This man is Mikael Neumann (a somewhat emaciated Ulrich Thomsen), and he is six weeks into a vacation that, from the sound of it, was precipitated by a total nervous breakdown. His comments – he will be our narrator and guide through a dark labyrinth – never really address his illness, if that is indeed the right term. He merely concedes that "certain details have great meaning," and that he "should take any opportunity that can help [him] move past" – what exactly, again we don't know. As he stands there and smokes, we wonder about this man, grim in Thomsen's unique way of looking at once both grim and lovable, thin and nervous without a single twitch, hungry in the way he devours his cigarette again and again. His wife Sigrid (Paprika Steen), an architect who inherited the house from her architect father, will never be mistaken for a beauty queen yet possesses what faddish writers like to call moxie. Within a few short minutes of spousal interaction, we learn the following about Mikael: he has a condition, or thinks he has a condition, that makes him a liability for simple chores and assignments; he is plagued by thoughts of his work colleague Jørgensen, who appears to be overdue for a dinner invitation; and he is either the stricter of the two parents or simply the more dominant, since when their only child Selma (Emma Sehested Høeg) tries to negotiate a return time from her boyfriend's place, Sigrid immediately defers to Mikael's permission of an extra hour. The small smile subsequently exchanged between father and daughter is one of true love and understanding, a vital detail because it suggests, in light of later events, that Mikael Neumann is not a monster. What he really is does not surface until the appearance of Sigrid's brother, the nebbish physician Frederik (Lars Brygmann).

Frederik is a scientist and a frightful bore; he is also a perfect foil to what we will be expected to understand as Mikael's latent heroic qualities. In a more normal film, however, Frederik would not flash that mildly sinister streak that we detect from the very beginning. Frederik, you see, comes from money, as does Sigrid, and his privileged existence's only genuine challenge is maintaining the interest of his dishy spouse Ellen (Stine Stengade). The two couples dine together chez Neumann and the subject of conversation between the siblings inevitably turns to the beautiful house that Sigrid, not Frederik, inherited. She's an architect, he explains to his wife, who doesn't seem to need the explanation. Indeed, a later scene determines that he and Ellen have been together for "ages," so how does this detail make sense? It only does if Frederik is providing a justification not to his wife but to himself. In other words, the only reason that Frederik did not get the house is because Sigrid embraced their father's vocation whereas he did not (while Sigrid apparently took "a long time" to get over her father's death, her brother's admission that he visited their father right before he passed away is met with Sigrid's genuine surprise). This subplot, abetted by clear erotic tension between Ellen and Mikael, who seem to agree in conspiratorial asides that the siblings are nice if a bit dull, adds a dimension to the film that renders the main story line all the more riveting. And what is that story line, you ask? An offer to fix Mikael's problem, made of course by his ever-helpful brother-in-law. In no small coincidence, the offer occurs at an unusual location: in the middle of our gorgeous lake upon which Mikael was staring as our film opened and which Frederik seems to behold with a restrained sigh. The two men row, row, row their boat well out of earshot, and Frederik just so happens to mention that, going forward, Mikael will be rowing alone. Frederik's free time will be violently dented by lab tests of a new anti-depressant on some volunteers. "The trick," he adds with the same flippancy, "is to get normal people to do it. Sick people will try anything." This greatly interests Mikael, seated so that he cannot see his brother-in-law. Frederik also cannot see Mikael's face, although we sense that the comment was well-planned and designed to bait Mikael in precisely the way it succeeds. "I don't think Sigrid would like you being a guinea pig," says Frederik, with no conviction whatsoever in that statement, eliciting the retort at the beginning of this review. 

Up to now, we have little more than an elegant, restrained portrait of someone who is ill: ill in the way that many people become ill; ill because life has changed and we have not changed or do not want to change; ill because life and we have taken different forks in the road yet seem to be aware of each other's presence, on skew tracks drifting farther and farther apart. Had the director not developed the plot any more deeply and just relied on the sustained excellence of his cast, we would likely have had a tidy melodrama with a sprinkling of memorable moments. But once Mikael gets his hands on the new anti-depressant, the film skids into a series of sharp turns yet never quite spins off the road. There is that spontaneous brawl at the clinic, towards which Mikael feels both repulsion and attraction; the even odder retreat to Mikael's birthplace in the countryside – our film is at pains to remind us that Mikael, to use an old idiom, is a husband of the left hand – where he encounters some old chums and a nubile eighteen-year-old by the name of Pia, but not the person he told Sigrid he was visiting, namely his mother; and then there is Ellen. The pills have made Mikael braver with life, as well as with the loveliest shades that life offers. "You ended up with Frederik but you always fancied me," he tells Ellen one temerarious evening. Her reaction addresses that claim, as well as apparently every other sentence the two have ever exchanged, and Ellen's perception of Mikael has shifted forever. Ellen is a lovely young lady, still studying as if she were student-age herself. "Is that why you won't have his children?" asks Mikael, again discharging from point-blank range. One thing leads to a few others and, ultimately, to a superb scene where Mikael and Sigrid discuss how Frederik wouldn't be able to handle certain information.  

Halfway through the film, Mikael returns to work and we finally get to see the enigmatic Jørgensen mentioned right at the beginning – but we don’t get to see him for long. Mikael waits alone in Jørgensen's office, takes a look at the latter’s family photograph, and decides he'll come back another day. Is Jørgensen only a McGuffin, the successful entrepreneur and family man that Mikael cannot become? Or is he the person in the original Danish title, Den du frygter (“He whom you fear”), some evil and distant enemy? One of Thomsen's great assets as an actor is an uncanny ability to make himself look honorable regardless of the situation. And perhaps that skill of deception is exactly what Mikael fears most.   

The Laughing Man

The bus, as usual, was quiet when he climbed in – as proportionately quiet, at any rate, as a theatre with dimming house lights.

The Comanche club, you may not have heard of it, is an organization devoted to the betterment of young boys through camaraderie and physical fitness. The boys range from eight to ten or so, a good distance from the perilous hormonal threshold that will transform their lives in every way possible. As such, their primary focus is to be boys and have fun doing boy things, which involves first and foremost the pursuit of age-appropriate sporting activities (baseball) as well as the development of a narrative that each boy has, a narrative of where he came from and where, if anywhere in particular, he is going. I say boys tend to possess such inner stories not because girls don't as well, but because little girls tend to mature much more quickly than little boys and, with similar speed, develop values that they will keep for life. A girl can be fully-formed around fourteen; a fourteen-year-old boy never possibly could. A young teenage girl may have loved and lost and loved again; a young teenage boy will have gotten a glimpse at this mysterious power from only two sources: from books, in which love may play a greater or lesser role, and from observing older boys, whom we eventually begin to call men.

What is a man? Every society has its list of ingredients. Being familiar with not too many men at this point, our Comanche club members unanimously nominate their Chief (all Comanche tribes need chiefs) as the best example of what they think a man is. A description is provided by our narrator:

John Gedsudski, of Staten Island. He was an extremely shy, gentle young man of twenty-two or -three, a law student at N.Y.U., and altogether a very memorable person .... he was an Eagle Scout, an almost-All-America tackle ... and it was known that he had been most cordially invited to try out for the New York Giants' baseball team. He was an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptuous first-aid man .... The Chief's physical appearance ... is still clear in my mind. If wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had him a giant in no time. The way things go, though, he was a stocky five three or four – no more than that. His hair was blue-black, his hair-line extremely low, his nose was large and fleshy, and his torso was just about as long as his legs were. In his leather windbreaker, his shoulders were powerful, but narrow and sloping.

What elements of this passage are poppycock and what are the plain truth? Well, in the Chief's "leather windbreaker," which will not be worn at a key moment later in our story, his shoulders were probably indeed "powerful." What they were for certain is more powerful, more manly, and more imposing than any of the shoulders of the Comanches, with our nine-year-old narrator being no exception. Everything about the chief says man, strong man, tough man, a man's man. We have left out, however, the Laughing Man.

To describe the tortures the Laughing Man endures to achieve that hideously ironic moniker is hardly worth our consideration. His tale, as it were, is merely a pile of well-boiled clichés woven into a preposterous and never-ending plot. It was begun by the Chief to appease his weary tribe on the bus ride home every afternoon, a time in which what weighed upon the Comanches' minds was why they could not always be Comanches:

We Comanches relied heavily and selfishly on the Chief's talent for storytelling .... Once he started narrating, our interest never flagged."The Laughing Man" was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.

The story even features one of literature's oldest chestnuts: the child who was kidnapped by bogus parents, and who is really the child of a king waiting to be rescued. Except that the king and his queen are not royalty at all, but a pair of missionaries, and the kids who so adore the Laughing Man's tale are his own progeny:

I was not even my parents' son in 1928 but a devilishly smooth impostor, awaiting their slightest blunder as an excuse to move in – preferably without violence, but not necessarily – to assert my true identity. As a precaution against breaking my bogus mother's heart, I planned to take her into my underworld employ in some undefined but appropriately regal capacity. But the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter.

Perhaps I had not mentioned that these events occurred in 1928; perhaps it does not matter. We have all known young boys who like to think of themselves as secret operatives in a world of infinite codes. Yet the Laughing Man, forced into his despicable life by despicable cruelty, has somehow evolved into a hero for these callow ignoramuses; he is the literal lone wolf, with his best friend being a canis lupus called Black Wing. When the Chief stops the bus on an unusual corner, "some twenty back-seat drivers at once demanded an explanation," but he simply hushes the jeers with another installment of the saga. Again, this does not matter; only a fool would expect more. What matters is the Laughing Man, which doesn't seem to interest the chief quite as much as a young lady by the name of Mary Hudson.

Mary Hudson is one of the three girls the narrator has ever seen who were blessed with "unclassifiably great beauty at first sight"; the other two are so superbly and pithily described that we shall leave them as enigmas for the curious reader. This fact is important in the way that, however much he may deny it, a woman's beauty is important to a man. A woman's beauty is what most makes her different from men; it remains her most feminine ability, the ability to be something completely different, and exotic, and delicious, and wonderful. Over time, some men grow immune to all but the most ravishing of beauties, the true "lookers" or "knockouts" (women are attributed some of the finest terms in a man's imagination, as well as many others) that one comes across once in a very blue moon. But we are still dealing with the world of little boys, little boys who "for poise" would "pick ... up a stone and throw it against a tree," who sometimes display that "some-girls-just-don't-know-when-to-go-home look," a policy most of them will radically reverse with time. So when Mary Hudson insists on playing baseball, insists that the Chief, to whom she nurses an unknown relationship, let go of her bat, and then swings "mightily at the first ball pitched to her and hit[s] it over the left fielder's head," we get a most complimentary remark from our narrator: "It was good for an ordinary double, but Mary Hudson got to third on it – standing up" (later on we are told that "she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base"). We wonder, however, with all this admiration, whether she would take umbrage at the Laughing Man's referring to her as Black Wing.

Der Vorleser

Denial is an inconspicuous form of betrayal.

                                                                                                         Michael Berg, The Reader

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, in prescient view of what was to come by century's end, a new form of art was created that wasn't new at all. The English term for it, which I loathe, is "bourgeois tragedy," a direct calque of the German Bürgerliches Trauerspiel. Although the words quite obviously share a root, bürgerlich ("citizen's," "civil," although also "bourgeois") and Bourgeoisie in German are normally two different things with appropriately divergent associations. For that reason was the new form of art not really about the bourgeoisie per se, it was simply not about the nobility. Gone were the kings, queens, and princes who had dozens of myrmidons and helpers to do their bidding; in their stead came a merchant, a welder, a tailor, characters who hitherto had only been part of the stage props. The result was that the throngs, whose previous portrayals had been exclusively in comedy, were now allowed to suffer. 

And suffer they did. Since that time and the French Revolution we have never stopped championing the underdog, never ceased to praise the simple values of the less privileged strata of society, and currently are more inclined to listen or read or watch a story of humble beginnings (and often ends) than sit through another tedious melodrama about a king and his crown (count me among those completely antipathetic to such drivel). Despite the futile efforts of some frustrated theorists to make the bourgeoisie evil in every language, their middle class habits and middling opinions are the center of commercialized existence and will stay that way for as long as you and I roam this earth (and probably much longer). Our bourgeoisie may be proverbially average, unimaginative, inflexible, and dull, but they are also for the most part quite harmless provided that their view of the world never usurps a more enlightened examination of human affairs. Before I am accused of snobbery, I will say this: the best thing we can do in life is treat everyone the same way. We will love only a few, and we will accord them a special status; but any other soul has as much right to our respect, admiration, and friendship until proven that these are things they do not deserve. Few are they so irredeemably unpleasant or evil as to merit our indifference, indeed, our contempt, and it is much easier to despise those who put their power and money to selfish and destructive use. But let us not overlook those aforementioned myrmidons, the small petty cowards whose actions or inactions led to death just as much as that of their vilified leaders. That question, among many others, is raised in this fine book.

Our hero and narrator is Michael Berg, a native of this German state now in his mid-fifties and, just as importantly, an attorney. But as the book opens in 1958, Berg is fifteen and stricken with jaundice. One day, a wretchedly ill Michael inadvertently becomes the guest of a woman only known as Ms. Schmitz, an almost anonymous name for a citizen without anything better to do than take care of someone else's sick teenager. After making sure he is well enough to leave and sending him on the road homeward, Ms. Schmitz becomes the center of Michael's life in a way he could never have imagined. He returns to thank her and intimacy abetted by loneliness takes its course. Yet theirs is no ordinary relationship, and not only because Michael is fifteen and his lover, whose name is eventually revealed as Hanna, is thirty-six. He loves her not because he knows what that means, but because she has made him into an adult. In other words, his love is really a discovery of his own sexuality. He writes her a poem in the style of this German poet, but the exercise is solely meant for Michael – a studious, almost nerdy lad who worships books and has little to offer the opposite sex except the promise of a great mind (at fifteen, such a promise falls on the deafest of ears) – to experience what lies behind his favorite literary works. Perhaps for that reason, he thinks, is Hanna so keen on listening to him read. 

He reads her book after book as their liaison which begins in the spring as so many do, lasts into the later part of the summer, and they follow a methodical routine of reading, bathing, lovemaking, and eating. Hanna works as a tram conductor, collecting and punching tickets, and says that she has worked dozens of other jobs in her itinerant life. To Michael, who doesn't know any better, this description of her world just makes her seem all the more vulnerable and, eventually, less attractive than some of his coevals whom he now has the sexual confidence to conquer. As the end of summer comes, so fades his connection to Hanna, which he justifies by foisting the responsibility for what happened on her:

I never learned what Hanna did when she wasn't working or when we weren't together. Whenever I would ask, she refused to answer my question. Our lives had no world in common; instead, she made the room for me in her life that she wanted to make.

Their separation is sudden, as are so many details in a book that takes its time to tell what, in the hands of someone other than Schlink, might have been a pithy cautionary tale. And as suddenly as the first part of Michael's life ends – that is, his childhood and innocence – there begins a second existence as a law student at this university where he aids a professor in documenting the trial of a group of middle-aged German women who served as sentries to some unwholesome forces in the 1940s. Among them, of course, is Hanna, and that is where the real story begins.

Numerous motifs intertwine and separate throughout the rest of the novel, but the main non-historical one is the reason why Hanna asked Michael to read aloud for her (which Vorleser means, a significance lost in the English "The Reader") – Hanna cannot read or write herself. A functional illiterate as a metaphor for wartime collaborators? Precisely this point has been made by many critics, as it would appear that only the dumb and uneducated were responsible for the atrocities of the war; yet such an interpretation could not be further from the truth. In the near-endless courtroom scene which in pages lasts almost as long as Michael's childhood, it becomes clear that Hanna's scapegoating is not intended as a font for pity; if anything, it is Michael who has had his memories destroyed by "ugly facts." A more accurate portrayal of the events presented in The Reader would suggest that the political reality of a nation or period can overshadow the smallest and most unimportant of personal details, and that historical tragedies are often reflected on every level of existence, including, most sadly, in the artistic. That said, Schlink, himself an attorney, proffers his readers a wealth of observations on the world and his characters: from the association of Hanna's mole on her shoulder with the mole of the rather unscrupulous driver who loses his temper with Michael, to the detached philosophy of Michael's father (who gives his children office hour appointments like he gives his students), a man devoted to learning and wisdom and somewhat incapable of having a normal conversation unfettered by profound concerns. That the driver's mole, like the mark of Cain, is actually on his temple, should tell you enough about the crimes on his conscience.

As can be expected from such a sensitive subject, there are also a few missteps. For example, chapter thirteen of part two is too self-conscious, too plagued (as it readily admits) by popular culture and its Philistine sensibilities. Yet this is rectified in the following chapter, a brief and harrowing account of indifference, which is indeed the worst thing that has ever happened to the human heart and intellect. And so do we contemplate indifference in its two guises: as the absence of caring or as the human body and mind's ability to heal itself, to overcome, to make do with the present and press on for survival in the future. In general, Schlink also errs when he turns his attention to the broader spectrum: terms like "collective guilt," "fate of the Germans," and a "generation of those who committed crimes, those who looked on, those who looked away, those who tolerated what was happening, and those who accepted it" are revolting clichés that ultimately disparage his book. But when he keeps it personal, when he adheres to the framework of the bourgeois tragedy of Michael and Hanna (to underscore this parallel, Hanna's first theater visit is to see this play), then he succeeds mightily. Some readers will never see past the thick, political implications of the novel, but true artistry is occasionally cloaked in topicality. What Michael recalls is love, love for being a young man in a beautiful country that affords him a myriad of opportunities to explore the world, and love for a woman who shows him the most basic pleasures of human interaction: companionship, laughter, understanding, and physical intimacy. Both ends of this spectrum meet in one lonely shade whom we should not pity, nor really seek to understand. After all, she is far more powerful a force in Michael's heart and mind than in any history book.