The Viewer

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Now draw attention to the use of dashes in this character description (slide 2). There are three examples where dashes are used in pairs as parentheses – what effect does it have when this extra information is added? Try reading the sentences aloud without the added words in the middle. The class will use similar grammatical features in the next lesson when they write their own character description. As of 2002 the novel had been translated into 25 languages. [12] Writing in The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called it "arresting, philosophically elegant, (and) morally complex." [15] 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." [14] 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, [12] and in South Africa it was awarded the 1999 Boeke Prize. Tabensky, Pedro Alexis (2006). Judging and understanding: essays on free will, narrative, meaning and the ethical limits of condemnation. Ashgate Publishing. p.70. ISBN 9780754653950.

Sophie, a friend of Michael's when he is in school, and on whom he probably has a crush. She is almost the first person whom he tells about Hanna. When he begins his friendship with her, he begins to "betray" Hanna by denying her relationship with him and by cutting short his time with Hanna to be with Sophie and his other friends. Milata, Paul. Zwischen Hitler, Stalin und Antonescu: Rumäniendeutsche in der Waffen-SS. Böhlau. Cologne 2007. The Viewer was a much more collaborative project than most picture book creation, where there is often – and strangely – little direct communication between author and illustrator, something I was familiar with as an illustrator of many short stories and book covers. Usually a text is written and then given to an illustrator to consider, a process overseen by an editor. Gary and I discussed concept, imagery and book design together from the outset, before any text was written, along with our mutual editor, Helen Chamberlin at Lothian Books, then an independent publisher based in Melbourne. Michael's mother, seen briefly. Michael has fond memories of her pampering him as a child, which his relationship with Hanna reawakens. A psychoanalyst tells him he should consider his mother's effect on him more, since she barely figures in his retelling of his life. a b Bernstein, Richard. "Once Loving, Once Cruel, What's Her Secret?", The New York Times, August 20, 1997.

Hanna Schmitz, a former guard at Auschwitz. She is 36, illiterate and working as a tram conductor in Neustadt when she first meets 15-year-old Michael. She takes a dominant position in their relationship. Years have passed, Michael is divorced and has a daughter. He is trying to come to terms with his feelings for Hanna and begins taping readings of books and sending them to her without any correspondence while she is in prison. Hanna begins to teach herself to read, and then write in a childlike way, by borrowing the books from the prison library and following the tapes along in the text. She writes to Michael, but he cannot bring himself to reply. After 18 years, Hanna is about to be released, so he agrees (after hesitation) to find her a place to stay and employment, visiting her in prison. On the day of her release in 1983, she commits suicide, and Michael is heartbroken. Michael learns from the warden that she had been reading books by many prominent Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and histories of the camps. The warden, in her anger towards Michael for communicating with Hanna only by audio tapes, expresses Hanna's disappointment. Hanna left him an assignment: give all her money to the survivor of the church fire. The first twelve titles were obviously all entered at the same time; at first I probably just read,

The Viewer’ by Shaun Tan and Gary Crew was a truly dark and moody book that gripped the children as soon as they saw the cover. Unlike the previous books that I had been given, I did not read this myself before sharing it with the children which meant that it was a new experience for all of us. Uhl, Heidemarie; Golsan, Richard J. (2006-09-20). Lebow, Richard Ned; Kansteiner, Wulf; Fogu, Claudio (eds.). The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. doi: 10.1515/9780822388333. hdl: 1811/30027. ISBN 9780822388333. S2CID 156505244. Gary Crew writes short stories, novels and picture books. Gary is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. He is particularly interested in researching the creative links between fiction and nonfiction in his novels and the creative interface between print text and visual text in his picture books. During his publishing career of over 30 years Gary has won the Children's Book Council of Australia's Book of the Year four times, twice for novels and twice for his picture books; the New South Wales Premier's Award, the Victorian Premier's Award, the American Children's Book of Distinction, the Aurealis Best Children's Short Fiction, the Wilderness Society's Award for Environmental Writing, and the Royal Geographic Society Whitley Award. Gary lives on the waterfront of subtropical Bribie Island. When he is not writing or lecturing, he loves to walk by the sea or read. train. It was a slow rush-hour train that stopped at every station; people got on and off. I sat at Hall, Katharina (July 2006). "The Author, The Novel, The Reader and The Perils of 'Neue Lesbarkeit': A Comparative Analysis of Bernhard Schlink's Selbs Justiz and Der Vorleser". German Life and Letters. 59 (3): 446–467. doi: 10.1111/j.0016-8777.2006.00360.x.

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While in the U.S., Michael travels to New York to visit the Jewish woman who was a witness at the trial, and who wrote the book about the winter death march from Auschwitz. She can see his terrible conflict of emotions and he finally tells of his youthful relationship with Hanna. The unspoken damage she left to the people around her hangs in the air. He describes his short, cold marriage, and his distant relationship with his daughter. The woman understands, but nonetheless refuses to take the savings Hanna had asked Michael to convey to her, saying, "Using it for something to do with the Holocaust would really seem like an absolution to me, and that is something I neither wish nor care to grant." She asks that he donate it as he sees fit; he chooses a Jewish charity for combating illiteracy, in Hanna's name. Having had a caddy stolen from her when she was a child in the camp, the woman does take the old tea caddy in which Hanna had kept her money and mementos. Returning to Germany, and with a letter of thanks for the donation made in Hanna's name, Michael visits Hanna's grave after 10 years for the first and only time. After a few novels, the Reading Teachers = Reading Pupils group were given a picture book to share with the children in our class. It was a rare opportunity for Year 5 students to be read to in this way as unfortunately the curriculum often requires ‘meatier’ texts but little did they know just how enthralling and thought-provoking the book was going to be. Wroe writes that the book had sold 75,000 copies in the U.S. by 2002. Ruth Franklin (2010) writes that the figure is two million; see p. 201.

As part of the class, the students attend the trial on a weekly basis. At the court, when the defendants’ names are called, Michael discovers that Hanna is one of the former Nazi guards on trial. However, despite the pain that Hanna’s departure once gave him, he “felt nothing” at learning this news. During her preliminary hearing, Hanna reveals that she rejected a promotion at her factory job shortly before signing up as a prison guard, making it appear to the jury that she had voluntarily, if not enthusiastically, joined the SS. Hanna’s lawyer does not do much to help her salvage this first bad impression, and Hanna is kept under detention for having ignored summonses. Unlike his classmates, who attend only weekly, Michael attends the trial every day, always watching Hanna. As Michael becomes exposed to more horrors for a prolonged period of time, he begins to feel numb and is emotionally distant, not unlike the survivors and even perpetrators of the Holocaust who are exposed to evil on a regular basis. She is convicted and sentenced to life in prison while the other women receive only minor sentences. After much deliberation, he chooses not to reveal her secret for fear of making her situation worse, as their relationship was a forbidden one because he was a minor at the time. I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don't even have to have been there, but if they do, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them to or not. Before the trial I could still chase them away when they wanted to come. [18]There are a few key ideas that emerge; that all the mechanisms work to record and re-play images of violence and death, especially the collapse of successive human civilisations, whether by natural disaster or self-destruction. The use of circles, spirals and other cyclical patterns through the illustrations emphasis the idea of life and death revolutions, that things are on one hand mortal and immortal in their patterns. There are numerous ancient symbols of this, such as the serpent biting its own tail, and the concept of time as cyclical, rather than linear, is historically much more dominant. The belief that civilisation progresses continuously is ultimately a temporary illusion; things either change radically or collapse, the current ecological crisis of our own age proves the case. Still we go on as if oblivious to the slow disaster unfolding before us. As critics of The Reader argued increasingly on historical grounds, pointing out that everybody in Germany could and should have known about Hitler's intentions towards the Jews, there has not been a great deal of discussion about the character "Hanna" having been born not in Germany proper, but in the City of Hermannstadt (modern-day Sibiu), a long-standing centre of German culture in Transylvania, Romania. The first study on the reasons Germans from Transylvania entered the SS painted a complex picture. [38] It appeared only in 2007, 12 years after the novel was published; in general, discussions on The Reader have solidly placed Hanna in the context of Germany. angle, or to let it fall, or to lean her chin on her hand. She sat as if frozen. It must have hurt to He lives with his wife Christine on several acres in the cool, high mountains of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland in Queensland, Australia in a house called 'Green Mansions' which is shaded by over 200 Australian rainforest palms he has cultivated. He enjoys gardening, reading, and playing with his dogs Ferris, Beulah, and Miss Wendy. In his spare time he has created an Australian Rainforest Garden around his home, filled with Australian palms. Gary loves to visit antique shops looking for curios and beautiful objects. It took me multiple reading to enjoy this as much as I do now and, ultimately, fully interpret what I think the story is sharing with us. As always with both Gary Crew AND Shaun Tan, I need a bit of warming up to appreciate them so this took an evening of close reading to glean some understanding.