The reader by bernhard schlink summary full#

Schlink’s drama is so carefully condensed and neatly parcelled out that the novel resembles a three-act play.

The reader by bernhard schlink summary full#

A reunion becomes a showdown full of spilled secrets, shock revelations and, in time, tragic consequences. However, there are more blasts from the past when Gundlach drops in by helicopter and Schwind arrives by boat. But Schlink restores order in his next section where, back in the present, his lawyer tracks Irene down at her secluded beachside cottage. Unfortunately, Irene’s exit strategy is both convoluted and contrived, and it clumsily concludes an otherwise finely constructed opening section. Instead, she exploits his innocence and disappears with the painting for four decades. Having fallen for her, he is more than happy to oblige, and naïvely believes they can elope together. When Irene catches wind of the transaction, she hatches an escape plan and enlists the lawyer’s help. The lawyer mediates in the dispute, but before he can lead the men to an amicable, lawful solution, he finds himself steered towards a dubious compromise: drawing up a contract which permits the return of property to its rightful owner – the damaged painting to the painter, the errant wife to the husband. The lawyer reveals why Schwind needs his services: little by little, Gundlach is vandalising his painting, defacing the woman who spurned him and angering a proud and powerless artist. Perhaps, but Schlink soon embellishes his set-up by adding liberal dabs of originality. “A rich old man and his young wife painted by a young artist, they fall in love and run away. “How must our story seem to you?” Irene tells the lawyer. Gundlach got his painting but Schwind made off with the real thing. She is also the wife of Peter Gundlach, a wealthy businessman who commissioned Schwind to paint her. She is Irene Gundlach, the beautiful girlfriend of Karl Schwind, an up-and-coming painter. Immediately, he is bewitched again by its subject: 'She was softness, seduction and surrender.' Instead of flying back to Frankfurt, he contacts a detective agency to find out the owner of the painting and the whereabouts of the woman he loved and lost 40 years ago.Īs he waits for news, he casts his mind back to his first case as a young hot-shot lawyer and his first encounter with her. The unnamed narrator is a German lawyer who, while on business in Australia, comes across the painting in a Sydney art gallery. The Woman on the Stairs is a novel about a fictitious painting called Woman on Staircase. Schlink's latest book sees him sticking to this winning formula and playing to his strengths.

Unlike John Grisham, his books are not legal thrillers, more mysteries which have a close brush with the law and which rigorously and intelligently examine its attendant dark matter – moral conundrums, crises of conscience, blame, betrayal and culpability. German-born Bernhard Schlink, a professor of law at Berlin’s Humboldt University, writes fiction which incorporates aspects of his legal background and elements of his country’s 20th-century history.