426
PARTISAN REVIEW
Adah, a silent poet, handicapped by a brain damage which prevents her
from speaking, yet marvelously aware, provides the book with some of its
most eloquent pages of observation, eventually returning to America, she
becomes a medical doctor specializing in the study of viral diseases.
Kingsolver's book braves a dozen difficulties that would defeat most
writers. She successfully encompasses a large scene and much detail, and
carries off her enterprise with bravura. Without making any banner dec–
larations, she succeeds in putting across the contemporary theme of
intercultural understanding to which she is attached. In an opposite sort
of novel of two hundred small pages, Bernhard Schlink's
The Reader
tells
us what seems at first a timeless love story. It is only after forty pages that
we can place the period in which it transpires by the casual mention that
fifteen-year-old Michael Berg has been reading in his schoolbooks about
the recent German past of the Third Reich. It all begins with a day when
young Michael, suddenly corning down with hepatitis, collapses, vomiting,
in the street on his way home from school. A strange woman washes his face
in the courtyard of her building and helps him to his own house. When,
after weeks, he is well enough to go out, his mother suggests that he go back
to thank his rescuer and bring her a bunch of flowers. What happens, how–
ever, is the start of a love affair. With a remarkable simplicity and
immediacy, Schlink tells the familiar tale of ini tiatory sexual passion as
though it has never been told before. The older man who is relating this
experience of his youth recovers moment after moment in all their incor–
ruptible freshness. On the visit with the flowers he glimpses the woman as
she pulls on her stocking and perceives, without consciously recognizing it,
that she is beautiful: "slow-flowing, graceful, seductive--a seductiveness that
had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but was an invitation to
forget the world in the recesses of the body"-and she catches his stare. He
comes again, and is asked to carry up a scuttle of coal from the cellar, dirt–
ies himself in the process, is given a bath and wrapped dry while, feeling his
instant arousal, she tells him, "That's why you're here." So, the schoolboy
becomes a lover who learns not
only
how to receive but how to give plea–
sure, although the woman he loves is thirty-six. She is a streetcar conductor
who often works a late shift, and he soon falls into the routine of finding
her at home between the end of his schoolday and his family's suppertime.
He soon feels superior to his schoolmates-and a Ii ttle detached
from them. He is someone wi th a secret life he learns to protect, suc–
cessfully concealing his visi ts to the person who has become the center
of his life, working harder at his school work to make up for his hours
of joy. The older man recalls, "My days had never been so full and my
life had never been so swift and so dense." Coming in to supper one
time, he discovers that even his family have become part of a lost world:
