He mentions the women he sleeps with now, and how he feels he ought to fall in love with them as a kind of pay-back: it isn’t only the fact that this is a translation that makes him seem almost forensic in his account. The adult Michael seems analytical, self-aware, and his descriptions are as factual as he seems to feel necessary. He tells us how intense the relationship is, for him if (probably) not for her. ‘I kept getting erections, but I didn’t want to masturbate.’ Thanks for clarifying that for us, Mike. What we do get is this rather factual account. It’s a bit like the problem you always get with translations: you know you aren’t getting all of it. I’m sure if I was German and understood the schoolboyish references I’d be more immersed in the world Michael describes. Schlink wants it to be a life-changing experience and, according to his way of doing things, that means we need a picture of the life that’s going to be changed. This one is rooted in ordinariness, and the affair has to be an eruption into Michael’s mundane life – making the long illness of the previous winter into a stroll in the park by comparison. Couldn‘t Schlink just have got on with it? Couldn’t he just have made the reader accept as a given that these two are together and leave out all the rather dull details about this rather dull boy’s life?īut that would have been a different novel. I wondered how necessary such plotting is. Schlink gets these two unlikely bedfellows together through a credible enough series of accidents, refers in sufficient detail to a 15-year-old boy’s sexual proclivities, creates enough believable reasons for his family to leave him alone to get on with it…. Which doesn’t make it either vivid or particularly likeable, of course. What do I think – bearing in mind that, unlike the first time I read it, I know exactly what’s coming? What I think is, it’s incredibly careful, workmanlike, crafted. In Chapter 17 she disappears… so the affair’s over with nearly two thirds of the novel yet to run. When I saw it I was surprised that so much of the film covers events after Part 1: all my most vivid recollection of the novel, except for the secret in her past that changes everything, is of the strange little affair between the 15-year-old and the woman old enough to be his mother. Within the past few months I’ve also seen the film version. I’ve read it before, about ten years or so ago when everybody was reading it, and I remember liking it without quite remembering why.
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