SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Thoughts about Hanna.” London Review of Books 19, no. 21 (30 October 1997): 22-3.

In the following review, Annan compliments the moral ambiguousness of the character of Michael in The Reader, noting the work's “virtuoso passages of evocation.”

Last year in Bonn in the brand-new Museum of Modern History (Haus der Geschichte) I watched a video about concentration camps. A row of female guards captured by the Allies stood in line, middle-aged and grim. Then a younger one spoke straight to camera. She was blonde and dishevelled; she said her name, her age—24—and that she had been at Belsen two months. She looked terrified. I felt sorry for her, and shocked that I was. This novel [The Reader] is about someone like her, and examines the feelings I had.

It is an anxious, intense and gripping work, and the opening is characteristically abrupt: ‘When I was 15, I got...