The Secret

In a quietly riveting voice, as if remembering aloud, the Reader tells of a boyhood interlude with a woman, of his sexual awakening and its aftermath--events the man has kept carefully hidden throughout his subsequent dry life. Simultaneously, with “The Reader,” German author Bernhard Schlink presents a formally beautiful, disturbing and finally morally devastating novel. From the first page, it ensnares both heart and mind.

“When I was 15, I got hepatitis.” The laconic speaker is Michael, son of a conscientious housewife and a philosophy professor whose mind is generally on higher matters than his four children. The unstated time is the early ‘60s, the place a town on the Rhine, and it is on his way home from school that the boy, his illness not yet diagnosed, suffers a vomiting fit he can’t stifle. “When rescue came, it was almost an assault. The woman seized my arm and pulled me through the dark entryway into the courtyard . . . [where] wood was stacked . . . in an open workshop a saw screamed and shavings flew. The woman turned on the tap, washed my hand first, then both of hers and threw water in my face.”

After the stranger helps him home, Michael is bedridden until early spring. Then at his mother’s prodding, the convalescent brings a thank-you bouquet to the impoverished flat of his rescuer. She turns out to be Hanna Schmitz, 35, streetcar conductor. Moody, strong-boned and tough-minded, she’s no teenager’s obvious fantasy.

Months later, during a midday tryst, Hanna will ask her “kid” what sort of animal she reminds him of: “I ran my arms and hands over her broad back, her hard thighs, her firm ass, and also felt the solidity of her breasts and stomach against my neck and chest . . . on her calf I felt the constant twitching play of muscles. It reminded me of the way a horse twitches to repel flies. ‘A horse,’ I said.”

Part of the artistry of this novel lies in its limpid, understated realism, the tangible details that show how, during that first visit, a few commonplace and even comical acts, as choreographed by chance, led to Michael’s inescapable seduction. Or was it the boy who seduced the woman? The integrity of “The Reader” lies with the narrator’s refusal to assign blame according to initial, obvious interpretation; indeed, as the novel develops, its theme becomes the always-shifting landscape of guilt and shame, the impossibility of a final, static and unquestionable summing up.

A strong passion demands and engenders private rituals. Hanna praises her kid’s voice, insists that to begin their daily interlude together he read aloud to her from literature assigned at school; they bathe each other in her deep kitchen tub before making love. As the affair goes on, his optimism and new aura of confidence bring only good: the respect of family members, success in studies and new friends, including an admired classmate, Sophie. “I was completely happy.” But at the end of summer, without warning, Hanna disappears.

For all his anger and loss, Michael blames himself: In retrospect, he betrayed Hanna by not acknowledging her to his gang, by avoiding public moments, by a traitorous streak of shame he thought he’d kept hidden. No word comes, he can’t trace her. Desolation does its work. Numbed, he makes capricious use of Sophie and others. Indifferent, he enters law studies. Only then, as an adult observing a high court criminal trial, does he learn that his lover had all along concealed a far more dangerous secret of her own: Hanna, now 43, sits on the bench below him, among the accused.

Here begins the unfolding of the second, far darker layer of the story. Schlink, a professor of law at Berlin’s Humboldt University, and his character miss no nuance of Hanna’s trial. Her defense is clumsy; she antagonizes the judge. Depositions arrive from Israel. As the revelations become more damning, “I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. . . . I had chosen her . . . . [L]ove of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.” Like a miner’s lamp, Michael’s uncertainty about his lover’s past deeds and motivation casts circles to include the other defendants, their entire generation, his own parents, even the victims and illuminates startling new veins of guilt.

Much as in another haunting chronicle of a near-child’s passion, Marguerite Duras’ “The Lover,” the narrator’s exacting memory creates an unsentimental nostalgia. The past outshines the present. Taboos are broken. In “The Reader,” with terrible seriousness of purpose, Michael attempts to “comprehend the incomprehensible,” even to feel empathy with Hanna’s crimes.

Shortly before the high court’s final session, memory and mounting scraps of evidence lead Michael to a pivotal insight. Those charged in the case appear blind to the grotesque discovery. Should he speak out? Must he, in fact? Or does he have no moral right to do so? On this third level of anguish and ambiguity, the Reader’s smoldering involvement with Hanna is rekindled to burn on to the stunning, long-echoing end.