Word: moralisms
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Bernhard Schlink's The Reader is one of those tricky novels that, based on the sober moral questions it poses and its close-to-elegant style, pretends to high literary seriousness while offering its readers - millions upon millions of them in the 37 countries where it has been translated - plenty of lubriciously rendered romps in the hay with a woman in her mid-30s and an eager young man in his mid-teens. Stephen Daldry's film, written by David Hare, is faithful both to the novel's plot and to its higher aspirations. This is not an entirely good...
...need a Ph.D. in comparative literature to understand that Hanna's illiteracy symbolizes the willed ignorance of the German people about the genocide that was going on around them during World War II. Historically speaking, Germany was among the most literate nations and, also, one of the most morally conscientious ones - which is why Schlink's illiteracy conceit works so well. If you can read - whether it be a book or highly visible mass behavior - yet refuse to do so, then what might in another context be dismissed as no more than backwoods ignorance is transformed into a vast...
...idea that has lost much of its power to arrest our attention in fictional narrative. In some of the early Internet commentaries on this film, people natter on about the effect on the boy of having sex with an older, presumably exploitative woman - as if that's the big moral issue being explored here. Well, it didn't bother Oprah, who selected The Reader for her book club, and it doesn't bother me. At 15, boys are supposed to be having sex - or at least trying to have it. And I don't see how it is necessarily more...
...nice to love the president. 13. FM: You have an uncanny ability to write about basically anything. You discuss everything from sexuality, humiliation, and isolation. Is anything off limits?JK: No, not at all. When I am a person sitting before you, I am a moral person I am a good person. But when I am writing, I have no loyalties. I am the most treacherous person, and that’s what I tell my students. When writing, betrayal is the word but when you stop, sainthood is required. 14. FM: How does your current life now compare...
...Blackwater incident in 2007 was no My Lai, and we can be grateful that no such massacre has apparently occurred in Iraq. But the ‘war on terror’ ought always to have been conducted as much a cultural, humanitarian, and moral campaign as a military conflict. What President Bush’s White House never recognized is that the roots of militant Islam could always be traced back to the very sort of careless and baseless military intervention that it ended up endorsing. The war in Iraq may not be the imperialistic oil-grab some...