The Reader Bernard Schlink

Het is moeilijk om je voor te stellen dat Arno Geiger dit boek niet gelezen heeft vooraleer hij zijn 'met ons gaat het goed' geschreven heeft. Schlink publiceerde zijn 'voorlezer' in 1995. Ik heb het kunnen kopen in 2005 in Waterstone's (Welcome to Waterstones.com)in Oxford (één van mijn favoriete boekhandels). Ik heb zo'n lijstje van boeken - al dan niet gelezen -die ik in mijn bibliotheek wil hebben. Uit ervaring weet ik dat het bijna onmogelijk is, om oudere boeken te kopen in Vlaamse boekhandels. Blijkbaar kunnen of willen zij hierin niet investeren.

Dit roept toch enkele vragen op. Welke functies willen boekhandels vervullen in de biotoop van de lezer? In eigen biotoop van boekverkopers? Waarom zou ik als lezer naar een boekhandel gaan en niet naar een grootwarenhuis of een krantenwinkel? Zijn zij nog mediatoren, 'book lovers', of zijn ze gewoon 'koffiehandelaren'? Ik heb nog altijd zo'n idee dat een boekhandelaar een verwoed lezer moet zijn, zoals de oude man in de overdekte markt in Oxford(http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/coveredmarket/) die Engelse literatuur aan 1 pond verkocht. Hij was altijd aan het lezen, bekeek je nauwelijks. Maar ik vraag me af of dat winkeltje nog bestaat, de laatste keer kon ik het niet meer vinden Ben's Cookies daarentegen...

Een tweede vaststelling gaat over de levensduur van een boek: Geiger zal kort zijn, maar Schlink gaat al 12 jaar mee en zal nog langer als ijkboek overleven. Waar hoort zo'n boek dan thuis? Bibliotheek, persoonlijke bibliotheek of...

Ik heb het herlezen en vind het nog steeds een adembenemend boek: hoe hij als 15-jarige jongen verliefd wordt op een oudere vrouw, die hele zintuiglijke ervaring. Hoe hij aan haar voorleest, zij opgaat in de verhalen. Hoe hij verstrikt geraakt in zijn schuldgevoel voor iets wat hij niet gedaan heeft, maar waarvoor hij wel de schuld op zich neemt opdat hij terug bij haar kan zijn, hoe hij zijn eigen identiteit ontwikkelt en in vraag stelt, hoe die ervaring het masterpatroon voor zijn leven wordt.

Citaten zijn belangrijke kapstokken in een leesgroep. Ik gebruik er eentje dat mijn vervreemding van de Nederlandse literatuur verwoordt:

And as always, the alien language, unmastered and struggled over, created a strange combination of distance and immediacy. One worked through the book with particular thoroughness and yet did not make it one's own (117)

Ik herken deze beleving: allen moet ik met enig ongemak (schaamte) toegeven dat ik dit gevoel vaak ervaar wanneer ik in het Nederlands lees. Engels geeft mij een immediacy, een onmiddellijkheid waarbij ik niet meer stilsta. Vertaalde werken maar ook boeken met Nederlands als brontaal leiden altijd tot gemopper.

In dit verhaal is deze zin niet zo onschuldig: je zou het kunnen interpreteren als goedkeuring van boekverbranding, verdediging van een literair patritisme, zelfs nationalisme.

Schlink tracteert ons op een prachtige anatomie van de herinnering

Herinneringen zijn zintuiglijk, blijven hem achtervolgen in zijn dromen. De details van de herinneringen maken duidelijk hoeveel impact de relatie op hem gemaakt heeft. OOk laat hij zien hoe zijn herinneringen op zijn betekenisgeving en zijn ervaringen gebaseerd zijn. De opbouw van het verhaal bestaat uit drie delen: zijn herinneringen als puber die een relatie heeft met de 36-jarige Hanna (17 hfdstk); het afgestompte van het herinneringsloze als prille student en de reactivering van de herinneringen tijdens het proces en de gevolgen van de herinneringen voor het verdict ((17 hfdstk); Michaël als voorlezer voor de gevangene Hanna tot aan haar vrijlating/ zelfmoord (12 hfdstk) .

Her face as it was then has been overlaid in my memory by the faces she had later. If I see her in my mind's eye as she was then, she doesn't have a face at all, and I have to reconstruct it. (...) I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture its beauty (10)

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 (...) a seductiveness that had nothing to do with breasts and hips and legs, but that was an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body (14)


Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain? conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain? (36)

It is one of the pictures of Hanna that has stayed with me. Ihave them stored away, I can project them on a mental screen and watch them, unchanged, unconsumed (60)

But at a certain point the memory stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it (86)

Michaël besluit dat hij zich nooit meer zal laten vernederen de schuld op zich zal nemen voor dingen die hij niet gedaan heeft, nooit meer van iemand te houden die hem pijn kan doen als zij hem verlaat. Hij voelt zich onkwetsbaar en overgevoelig tegelijkertijd.

I recognized her, but I felt nothing (93)
But the memory was like a retrieved file. I felt nothing (98)
The anaesthetic functioned not only in the courtroom, and not only to allow me to see Hanna as if it was someone else who had loved and desired her, someone I knew well but who wasn't me. In every part of my life, too, I stood outside myself and watched (99)

When I think today about those years, I realize how little direct observation there actually was, how few photographs that made life and murder in the camps real. ( ...) Today there are so many books and films that the world of the camps is part of our collective imagination and completes our ordinary everyday one. Our imagination knows its way around in it, and since the television series Holocaust and movies like Sophie's Choice and especially Schindler's list, actually moves in it, not just registering, but supplementing and embellishing it. (...) The few images derived from allied photographs and the testimony of survivors flashed on the mind again and again, until they froze into clichés (147)


Ziekte en verbeelding

Hier zijn we weer in de liminal phase van Turner.

Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude! The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferates out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into someplace new, both familiar and strange (...) These hours without sleep, which is not to say that they're sleepless, because on the contrary, they're not about lack of anything, they're rich and full. Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again. They are hours when anything is possible, good or bad.
This passes as you get better. But if the illness has lasted long enough (...) you are still trapped in the labyrinth (16)

Verantwoordelijkheid

I don't mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behaviour. But behaviour does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behaviour, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts and my decisions my decisions. (18)

To this day, after spending the night with a woman, I feel I've been indulged and I must make it up somehow - to her by trying at least to love her, and to the world by facing up to it. (25)

But that some few would be convicted and punished while we of the second generation were silenced by revulsion, shame, and guilt - was that all there was to it now? (102)

so what would you have done? (110)

We couldn't just let them escape! We were responsible for them (126)

Schuld

In dit boek is schuld geen objectief begrip. Schuld is onderhandelbaar. Je kunt ervoor kiezen om schuldig te pleiten voor zaken die je niet gedaan hebt.Hier moeten we zeker de link leggen met een totalitair regime.

I took all the blame. I admitted mistakes I hadn't made, intentions I'd never had. Sometimes I begged her to be good to me again, to forgive me and love me. Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. (48)

We all condemned are parents to shame, even if the only charge we could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst (90)

If Hanna's motive was fear of exposure - why opt for the horrible exposure as a criminal over the harmless exposure as an illiterate? (132)

And if I was not guilty because one cannot be guiltu of betraying a criminal, then I was guilty of having loved a criminal? (133)

Besides, the existence of a leader exonerated the villagers (135)

But with adults I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves'
Not even if they themselves would be happy about it later?
He shook his head 'We're not talking about happiness, we're talking about dignity and freedom (141) mens als object: de andere beslist wat goed voor je is: totalitaire staat.
Of course one must act if the situation (...) is one of accrued or inherited responsability. If one knows what is good for another person who in turn is blind to it, then one must try to open his eyes. One has to leave him the last word, but one must talk to him - to him and not to someone else behind his back (142)

Interessant om dit tegenover Saramago en 'De stad der blinden' te plaatsen.

I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna's crime and to condemn it. (156)

I was no longer upset at having been left, deceived, and used by Hanna. I no longer had to meddle with her. I felt the numbness with which I had followed the horrors of the trial settling over the emotions and thoughts of the past few weeks. It would be too much to say I was happy about this. But I felt it was right. It allowed me to return to and continue to live my everyday life (159)

Whatever validity the concept of collective guilt may or may not have, morally and legally - for my generation of students it was a lived reality (167)

But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible. A,d perhaps we are responsible even for the love we feel for our parents. I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind, accommodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. (169)

Now escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere. (178)

Hanna became the court before which once again I concentrated all my energies, all my creativity, all my critical imagination. After that, I could send the manuscript to the publisher. (183)

I had granted Hanna a small niche, certainly an important niche, one from which I gained something and for which I did something, but not a place in my life. (196)

And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account (...) But the dead can (196)

The guarantee that the written one is the right one lies in the fact that I wrote it and not the other versions. The written version wanted to be written, the many others did not. (...)
For the last few years I've left our story alone. I've made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail (...) But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever ( 215)

The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive (216)


Opzoeken
Memoirs of a good for nothing, Eichendorff

Schrink, B
25th impression 2004
vertaling Carol Brown Janeway
London: Orion Books