The Reader or The Writer?

Last Sunday, when I went to the airport, I entered to the bookstore to buy something to read. I already had a book in my pocket, but I thought Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil was too a heavy read for a flight, so I bought another one. The Reader captured my attention. I remembered a former friend mentioned the movie to me some time ago, so I thought it would be soft read for a day's trip.

I've just finished this afternoon, while having a sandwich and two coffees at an indoor terrace facing a huge window in a mall in the center of the town. The sun was illuminating the place and I felt it would be a nice place to have a rest after a morning rambling around the old city. The book is pretty easy to read, with big letter case and 3 pages top chapters. I must say I read a very bad translation, with some typos and elementary school's grammar errors, like a wrong tendency in using preposition "en" instead of "a" in Catalan, not pretty advisable unless one is from Valencia. What can I get for just 7 euros?

I've enjoyed the story. It starts being an intimate small fable of an unbalanced love, but it develops into a wider range story with more serious implications. What first was something puerile, it turns out to be in the middle of the gravest and worst crimes in recent European history; and the trigger of it all? Just the most futile one. This small thing puts everything upside down and changes in a very disgraced way the lives of the two main characters, Berg and Hanna.

I've made myself some of the questions Berg asks to himself, shared some of the fears and felt some of the pains he describes. Probably, most people has, at some scale. I've used the same words he uses to describe his grief, "abandoned, cheated and used". I've felt also narcotized and unable to feel anything at the sight of the author of such pain. He makes the mistake of falling in love with a woman with an issue that put her apart from him, while he can't see farther from his nose. She is too proud and self-centered to admit her flaw and crime and accepts a bigger one, though false, like privately expiating for her sins.

He reads to her, and keeps reading to her more as a kind of revenge and to relieve his pain than for a true love towards her, which doesn't exist anymore. And she also takes revenge on him, or at least it seems so for what she does at the end. I started writing this blog for similar reasons, though now the goal has entirely changed. It is also sarcastic to me that he even mentions the Odyssey as his favorite book and at one point he talks about Nausikaa, asking to himself who his Nausikaa is, Sophie or Hanna.

Anyway, I'd like to say some more intelligent and funnier things, but tonight I can't since I drunk too much wine for dinner and my brain is shut down for maintenance. Read the book or watch the movie.