Are you trying to make holes in me?

I am slowly working my way through 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and this one is on the list. I thankfully have not seen the movie version yet, but now am dying to.

The Reader takes place in postwar Germany and follows young Michael Berg as he gets sick on the street and is rescued by an older woman. After recovering from his illness, Michael brings her flowers to thank her, and they develop a relationship. He reads to her, they take baths and make love all in Hanna's apartment. She is more than twice his age and Michael struggles to keep her separate from his school-life, even as he knows he is doing Hanna wrong by doing so.

I love the way their first days are described, how ardently Michael adores Hanna. He loves that she is not trying to seduce him really, it is more that she isn't trying to impress him, she just is impressive to him.

"It was more as if she had withdrawn into her own body, and left it to itself and its own quiet rhythms, unbothered by any input from her mind, oblivious to the outside world."

Hanna disappears and Michael later sees her on trail for crimes committed as a guard of a group of Jewish women at one of the concentration camps. However, Michael realizes that Hanna is taking the blame because she is ashamed of a secret she has kept from everyone, even him. Michael is so conflicted because he (and his generation)  is trying to deal with how to view their parents and elders who were either complicit in the Holocaust or stood by and let it happen. Just as we Americans had our "Great Generation", for Michael it seems that they had a Failed Generation. And yet he cannot completely condemn Hanna because he loved her.

"And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guilty of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal" 

What struck me most about Hanna's situation was that during her trial when she was accused of her actions and inaction she turned to the judge and  asked him what he would have done. And there can be no answer. While she serves her sentence in prison, Michael begins to send her tapes of himself reading to her, and yet cannot bring himself to visit or write her a letter.

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as a matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive."

There is a soft spot in my heart for tragic love stories, and this one is very bittersweet. It is difficult to remember that people who have done horrible, horrible things are often times just people who at their core are not bad or evil. Hanna did at least take part in a horrific act, and yet I cannot view her as a bad character.

I am very excited to see the film version and see how they handle all of this. But I would highly suggest this book to anyone.

all that were left of mercy

I started this book in June and finished it this afternoon. This is one of those books that would catch my eye continually at work and when a friend recommended it to me I got my hands on a copy from another friend, who seems to have every book I want to read but haven't bought yet.

I'm not going to lie to you, this book was difficult at times. Bolano often goes for pages without a line break and chapters are hundreds of pages long. Character names tripped me up a lot. And I'm still not sure if I got the book. But the writing is beautiful. We get pieces of personal histories from almost every character we meet and all of them are written in a way that you care about what the man with glasses who saves Hans from drowning thought about human nature. No character seems to be a throw-away.

This book is broken up into five parts: The Part About the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi. The parts are all connected with the town of Saint Theresa in Mexico, where hundreds of women are being murdered.

I really enjoyed the Part about the Critics because I felt that I could really connect to the character of Liz Norton. She is described best as not being "what one would ordinarily call a woman of great drive, which is to say that she didn't draw up long-term or medium-term plans and throw herself wholeheartedly into their execution. She had none of the attributes of the ambitious" (page 8). She and three other scholars all are experts on Benno von Archimboldi, a German novelist.

The Part About Amalfitano wasn't quite as good as the first part. I think I tried too hard to connect what was going on between the different parts and was a little annoyed that the connections seemed so tenuous. This section was still wonderfully written though.

The Part About Fate focuses on a reporter, last name Fate, who comes to Saint Theresa to cover a boxing match but ends up trying to write a piece on the murders. He also becomes tangled in the fate of Amalfitano's daughter.

The Part About the Crimes really dragged me down. This is also the longest section of the book and it chronicles the murders that have occur ed in and around Saint Theresa. We get a history on most of the girls and the police that are trying to solve the crimes. The end of this section really picked up for me, but I'm still unsure if I got the point of most of this section.

The Part About Archimboldi was my favorite. Here we learn about the mysterious author Benno von Archimboldi and are taken to Poland, Germany and Russia during World War II. I wish that this had been the longest section. I had no idea how everything was going to come together, and really there are a lot of things left open, but the last hundred pages just does it's job.

It took me a long time to read this book. Mostly because during parts three and four I would set it down and wasn't excited about reading it. Now that I finished I wish I had read the whole thing in a shorter time span, that way I would be able to view this as a whole work more. I read part five in something like two days and as I reached the end I found myself reading slower and slower. I didn't want it to end.

All of the quotes that I loved tended to be huge paragraphs and chunks of text that would be too much to take out and place here.

I would be really interested to read another book from Roberto Bolano, especially since this book wasn't technically finished when he died.

I had to do it for myself.

This is the second book by Jonathan Safran Foer I've read. I adored his other, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I had high, high hopes for this one.

I was not disappointed. What I like most about this book was the way that Foer is able to weave together not only several different stories, but different voices to create a full narrative that really hits home. We get the tale of a man named Jonathan Safran Foer searching for a woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. His guide, Alexander, and Alexander's grandfather bring their own distinctive voices. Foer's grandfather's village history is included, along with Foer's grandfather's personal history.

Personally I enjoy a book that uses different points of view, and I think that Foer has a great handle on this technique. I was not as moved as I was with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but I think this is because I, a non-Jew, have an easier time relating to the events of 9-11 than the horror of the Holocaust. That being said, I was unable to put this book down and could feel my heart aching at his phrasing - it was just beautiful.

I thought that this was a wonderful book, one that I would recommend to anyone who wants not only a gripping tale, but one that will leave you helplessly enthralled. I will be waiting with bated breathe for Foer's next work.

A few quotes to tempt you:

"The final time they made love, seven months before she killed herself and he married someone else, the Gypsy girl asked my grandfather how he arranged his books." ~ page 229

"We were stupid," he said, "because we believed in things."
"Why is that stupid?"
"Because there are not things to believe in"
(Love?)
(There is no love. Only the end of love.) ~ page 245

"She wore my teeth marks on her body like other wives might wear jewelry." ~ page 264

And - the exchange that stopped my in my tracks and got me really thinking about love and why we hang on to hurt:

"Do you like thinking about Mom?
No.
Does it hurt after?
Yes.
Then why do you continue to do it? she asked." ~ page 92

It kills me sometimes, how people die

So I had over a hundred pages left in The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, when I was getting ready for bed and told myself just one more chapter. So of course I was up late finishing it.

The novel is a coming-of-age tale about a young girl, Leisel, in Germany during the start of WWII. Her mother leaves her with a set of foster parents in the poorer part of town. Her brother dies on the way there. The whole book is told from Death's perspective, which I liked a lot. I expected Death to be glad of a war, glad for more to do, but Zusak's Death viewed it as another task, a boss yelling to get more done. Death was tired.

The characters in this book are so vivid. Rudy Steiner and Leisel are so clear in my mind. Their friendship is so realistic and refreshing. Leisel's Papa is a man you cannot help but want to hug. If only everyone had someone sitting next to them when they awoke from a nightmare, maybe the world would be a better place. The way that Zusak writes is very interesting, however, after a while I got a little annoyed with the way he would describe things. Sentences like (and I'm paraphrasing here): Her voice was like suicide. While I really like that particular sentence, I felt the novel was over populated with them. They became less special and unique.

Max (a Jew who is hidden in Leisel's basement) becomes very close to Leisel. His story that he leaves her is shown with pictures and different writing. I like when modern novels do this, using different forms and styles to evoke emotion in the reader. What struck me most about Max is that he was my age. My age, and hiding in a basement, unable to see the sky, unable to do anything except sustain. Leisel finds him in the parade of Jews near the end and the whole scene is just beautiful. She repeats lines to him from his story and he kisses the palm of her hand. And then they are whipped.

Death does give the ending away (for the most part), and I thought that knowing certain characters are going to die would make the actual death less powerful. I was wrong. Knowing made my heart hurt every time the character was around after then, and it did not soften the blow.

As a young adult book I think that this does an admirable job of brining a huge, horrible concept to the level of adolescence.

Some of my favorie quotes ( the title of this entry is one of them)

"Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness."

"The only thing worse than a boy that hates you: a boy that loves you."

Attonement

Alright, done with my first book of 2009, Ian McEwan's Atonement! Ok, firstly I was very bad and watched the movie first. I loved the film, although the only reason I cried was because they were shooting the horses on the beach. And maybe a little at the end. I was not sure what to expect from this book; I had never read anything else by McEwan before.

The book is told in three parts and from different points of view. We get the background of the Tallis family and their garden boy Robbie Turner. He and Cecilia's relationship is missinterpretted by her sister Briony with catastophic results. On the whole the novel had a modern Austen feel; the depth and detail that McEwan puts into his characters makes it easy for one to loose themselves in this world.

I personally find it very interesting to read about people during World War II. In Atonement, you get to see the war's effects on Robbie and also the efforts of Briony who becomes a nurse in London. I think that our generation has a hard time conceptualizing the amount of sacrifice and hardships that people used to go through during wartime. For many the only major inconvience now is if a news report or Presidential message interrupts So You Think You Can Dance. Briony's (and Cecilia's) choice to become a nurse makes me wonder how many girls I know would rush to do the same. Not many I think.

Briony's love of writing also holds great interest to me. But what I loved most about the novel is the end. She writes a neat happy ending to her tale and wonders to herself what purpose could have been served by telling the truth. The reality of Robbie and Cee is not a happy one. Her stories (if we can assume from the bits of the ones we are told of) all seem to end neatly. I think that McEwan's choice not to end the story with a happily ever after was the right choice. We get more of a scope of Briony's long standing guilt and sadness over the loss of her sister. We can relate to sadness, death, and seemily eternal sufferrig; not many can look at a happy ending and say "oh that's just like me."

My favorte line from the novel, as told in Briony's section of working as a nurse:
"From this new an dintimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended." ~page 287.

I love McEwan's writing style; I cannot wait to read another work by him.