Reception
The Reader sold 500,000 copies in Germany. It received several literary awards and many favorable reviews. In 2004, when the television network ZDF published a list of the 100 favorite books of German readers, it was 14th, the second-highest ranking for any contemporary German novel on the list. Critic Rainer Moritz of Die Welt wrote that it took "the artistic contrast between private and public to the absurd." Werner Fuld wrote in Focus that "one must not let great themes roll away, when one can truly write about them." In 1998 The Reader was awarded the Hans Fallada Prize, a German literary award.
As of 2002 the novel had been translated into 25 languages. Writing in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex." While finding the ending too abrupt Suzanne Ruta said in the New York Times Book Review that "daring fusion of 19th-century post-romantic, post-fairy-tale models with the awful history of the 20th century makes for a moving, suggestive and ultimately hopeful work." It went on to sell two million copies in the United States (many of them after it was featured in Oprah's Book Club in 1999) 200,000 copies in the UK, 100,000 in France, and in South Africa it was awarded the 1999 Boeke Prize.
Read more about this topic: The Reader
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