Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader was one of the masterpieces of Germany’s own Holocaust literature. It combined the pace of a thriller (which Schlink also writes) with the agony of the German second generation, torn between love of their elders and horror at their past.
Homecoming returns to this theme. It too displays the skills of a thriller writer — strong plotting, rapid-fire chapters. And it comes closer to home, since its quarry this time is not a lover but a parent. I hoped for another masterpiece, and so will Schlink’s many readers. I am sorry to say that they will be disappointed.
It starts well, with an evocation of Peter Debauer’s Swiss grandparents as mysterious and melancholy as anything in W. G. Sebald. But the grandparents die at the end of Part I, and simplicity and tenderness go with them.
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