SOURCE: Zimmerman, Ulf. Review of Der Vorleser, by Bernhard Schlink. World Literature Today 70, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 951.

In the following review, Zimmerman praises Schlink's characterization in Der Vorleser, calling the novel “powerful and poignant.”

Bernhard Schlink has made a reputation for himself as a master of mysteries grounded in the realities of past and present Germany. In Der Vorleser (The Reader) too there is a pivotal element of mystery, but it is subordinated to the profounder dilemmas of living German history.

The story is that of the fifteen-year-old Michael, who, in the late 1950s, is taken in by Hanna, a thirty-six-year-old woman, because he gets sick in front of her apartment house. He and Hanna drift into an affair of intense mutual dependence. As the title indicates, one of the central features of their ritual is that he reads to her before they proceed to showering and having sex. The...