As the years pass, Debauer cannot stop wondering about the missing ending. The book fascinates the boy, in part because he has never been able to finish it, having accidentally “torn out and disposed of” its ending before reading it.
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Debauer’s grandparents edit and publish a series entitled “Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment,” lowbrow books to which they often rewrite the endings “when they found them awkward, unbelievable, or immodest or when they felt they could make a better point.” The boy’s grandparents forbid him from reading the novels, trying to steer him toward more reputable authors, but he eventually does read one, a story of the homecoming of a German prisoner of war loosely based on Ulysses’ homeward travels in the Odyssey. The book’s narrator, Peter Debauer, whose mother raises him in postwar Germany, spends summers in Switzerland with his paternal grandparents (his father, he is told, was a member of the Swiss Red Cross who perished during the war). But the book’s primary focus is justice, and Schlink asks some important questions in that vein: Can evil ever be just? Is justice always necessary, or even always right? Homecoming, Schlink’s first novel since The Reader, builds on the earlier novel by exploring the guilt and complicity of the German generation born after the Holocaust. The Reader tackled issues such as the moral status of the post-Holocaust generation in Germany, what it means to be a persecutor, and what it means to be a victim.
She is also illiterate, and because of her illiteracy becomes the scapegoat for various other former Nazis who, brought to justice decades after the Holocaust, pin their own atrocities on her. Hanna, the reader eventually learns, had been a concentration camp guard during the Second World War, with a hand in sending Jewish women and girls to their deaths.
The plot follows a teenager who, seduced by a much older woman named Hanna, slowly becomes embroiled in her past. Its style sometimes echoes the works of Paul Auster, who, like Schlink, got his start writing detective potboilers. The Reader is hard to classify-part literary drama, part romance, part detective story. Translated into English in 1997, it became the first German book to top the New York Times bestseller list. In 1995, Bernhard Schlink, a German constitutional law judge and scholar, published a slim novel entitled The Reader that shook the literary world.
Homecoming, by Bernhard Schlink (Pantheon, 272 pp., $24)
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