In any other profession or dedication, those who arrive unexpectedly are labeled as upstarts or accused of trespassing. It is proven that literature always welcomes anyone who has something interesting to tell with open arms when he does it with that necessary delivery of any good writer.
Prototypical examples of this arrival to letters from very different places, which end up being common spaces, are, for example, doctors with types like Robin cook, or advocacy with the immeasurable John Grisham. In a space close to that of the legal profession, we find the judiciary. And among the judges, few have passed into fictional narrative with the significance of bernhard schlink.
Little could the connoisseurs of this author imagine, in his practice as a jurist, that he would be able to offer stories with such a humanistic background, with a captivating sensitivity and with approaches that are disturbing due to its natural counterweight between the existential and an action outlined with a kind of narrative efficiency.
Cars of lives and summary sentences on the nature of the soul that, in essence, only tries to occupy its days riding its own contradictions. Contradictions that, as expert evidence or testimonies, only seek to discover that ultimate truth that moves us.
Schlink always outlines highly detailed characters in its deepest part, where unspeakable secrets reside, not even under oath. The plot of each of his novels always pivots around that brilliance of the protagonists turned into a foundation, exposed in front of the jury of readers who listen attentively to issue a verdict as laymen in the matter of life who need to understand so many treasured enigmas that only on the last page do they find that ultimate motivation to give their whole life to their defense.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Bernhard Schlink
The reader
A few years ago film adaptation of this novel assaulted the box office of cinemas around the world thanks to a melancholic Kate Winslet who knew how to pick up the weight of an unforgettable character.
For the rest, as almost always, I keep the book. Because between the pages of this story you can enjoy more of a strange intention of repair that the protagonist, Hanna, deploys on the young fan of literature Michael Berg.
The boy barely reaches sixteen and his unexpected encounter with Hanna as a simple act of help, ends up unfolding as that new vital universe of accidents that change our lives. In the arms of that mature woman, Michael fuses his first orgasms with the confused sensation that this is where love resides.
And suddenly, in Hanna's lap everything takes on a meaning that does not yet correspond to her age. Afternoons pass between readings by great writers that precede sex.
Michael does not understand this ritual but she follows it with a deep religiosity, transmitting to us the idea that in the inappropriate relationship lies an atonement for a spirit laden with hindrances that make any hint of happiness in Hanna impossible beyond the dead times with Michael.
What comes next, we already remember everything from the movie. She disappears, moves away from that parenthesis of her life submerged in the ocean of the deepest secret.
Years pass and Michael, already a renowned lawyer, faces a high-profile case in which Nazi war criminals are tried, among the defendants he finds Hanna.
We can imagine the weight of the contradiction, the relevance of the disappointment for a lawyer who must accuse that remote love that changed his life. Of course, he recognizes her immediately while she can hardly associate the image of that man with that of the child to whom she gave her soul from her sex.
The granddaughter
With Schlink's unmatched ability to draw metaphors as constants between the subjective notion of existence and the scenarios we inhabit, on this occasion the matter takes on an even greater dimension by connecting with the historical; with that humanist touch that we already detected in The reader; with the passage of time from the chronicles that narrate the transcendental events and the small fragments of consequences, of experiences, of intrastories between the glorious and the dramatic towards survival.
In the sixties of the last century, Birgit fled East Berlin out of love and a desire for freedom to join Kaspar in the West. Now, after Birgit's death, Kaspar discovers that his wife paid a price for that decision. He left behind her baby, a girl, whose existence he hid from her her entire life. Kaspar, who has a bookstore in Berlin, decides to leave for the former East Germany in search of that girl who is now a woman.
Thus, he undertakes a journey to the past and present of Germany, and when he finally finds Svenja, his lost daughter, he discovers that she lives in a rural community, is married to a neo-Nazi and has a daughter, Sigrun. Kaspar would like to see a new family in them, but an entire ideological universe separates them, despite which he will try to get closer to who he considers his granddaughter and give her a different vision of the world...
Bernhard Schlink here returns to the vast ambition of his most celebrated work, The Reader. Once again he presents us with a complex political portrait of Germany, far from any Manichaeism. The result is a profound and dazzling book, which talks about history in capital letters and how it affects individuals, the still open wounds of reunification and the challenges of the present. But it is also a beautiful novel about love, loss, understanding and redemption.
the colors of goodbye
Colors as filters applied to life to transform what surrounds us according to the impressions or emotions that assail us. A chromatic scale is from Schlink that overwhelms in a range of visions as we occupy the souls of characters that take us into those moments dotted with the light necessary to cause the complete turn in existence.
This book brings together nine dazzling stories that present a detailed catalog of human attitudes and emotions. It starts with some pioneering scientists in the field of artificial intelligence in communist Germany, with the Stasi and the remorse in the background, and other stories follow: that of the man who impassively witnesses the evolution of the romance of a young neighbor whom he gave classes as a child, sensing that it cannot end well; that of the son who discovers the true face of his mother during a summer vacation on an island and thus also discovers himself; that of the music teacher who has a chance encounter with a woman with whom he was in love, from which a secret emerges and perhaps the possibility of going back to the past; the one of the stepfather who faces the desire of his lesbian daughter to have offspring; that of the man who must come to terms with the death of his brother, who has been almost a stranger to him...
Bernhard Schlink, as he did in his international bestseller The reader and in his later books, he continues here the meticulous and subtle exploration of the weaknesses and longings of human beings: love, fear of the passage of time, guilt, self-deception, dreams that evaporate, the pain of loss , the emotional ties that keep us afloat...
In this case, he does so through stories that are prodigious chamber pieces, constructed with elegance, precision and infinite nuances, in which his psychological depth, his prodigious handling of emotions, his insight to pose moral dilemmas can be appreciated... The result is a round book, which shows us the writer in the fullness of faculties, as one of the great active European narrators.
Other recommended books by Bernhard Schlink…
Summer lies
Summer, vacations, vital parentheses. A good title to tackle a volume of very interesting stitched stories that make up a mosaic about the contradictions, the lies, the defenses that each one raises to support their world and the walls that end up being these defenses.
Excuses made internal fortifications that prevent us from facing each new situation in the open, just as we are without the impediments built over the years.
It can be guessed that such a conception of the personality built brick on brick, capable of covering up lies and miseries, can only lead to stories about frustration, unrealization, sadness.
And in a way it is about that, the melancholy of the impossible when the impossible is fixed by limitations and self-inflicted.
The issue takes on titanic dimensions when these stories are introduced into very specific areas governed by emotions: love relationships, family relationships, unexpected illnesses.
In each story there finally appears an existentialist moral that perhaps seeks an awakening of our conscience or simply an assumption of our defeat.
Selb's Justice
Although the arrival of the German black genre in Spain seems to have been capitalized in recent times by Charlotte Link, there is much more to enjoy Germanic noir. And this novel in which an outstanding character such as detective Gerhard Selb was born, deserves and a lot to be enjoyed, as well as the other two in the series that little by little is coming to our country.
From the outset, the case that Gerhard has to face escapes from his usual performance. In his seventies, despite feeling in top shape, investigating a hacker does not seem his specialty.
But Gerhard can't turn down a case from a large pharmaceutical client. With a very fluent language, the action progresses in a singular way between the assigned case and a remote time lived by Gerhard, when he acted for the Nazi regime in the work of prosecuting dissidents.
And precisely in that strange mirror between something rabidly current and the ghosts of the old researcher, a transition is being marked towards an intrigue in which you sense that everything can end up being magically linked, as it happens.
