Self's Punishment

by Bernhard Schlink | Literature & Fiction |
ISBN: 0753818213 Global Overview for this book
Registered by nice-cup-of-tea of Zürich, Zürich Switzerland on 5/3/2006
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by nice-cup-of-tea from Zürich, Zürich Switzerland on Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Bought @ Buecher Brocky in Zurich, an enormous and fantastic second hand bookstore :-)

Journal Entry 2 by nice-cup-of-tea from Zürich, Zürich Switzerland on Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Finishd this, but didn't really get on with it - didn't like the style of writing (maybe it was the translation?), didn't like Self the protagonist, didn't really engage with the plot or the characters. Schade. Really liked "The Reader"!

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
*Starred Review* This stellar series debut presents former Nazi prosecutor turned private investigator Gerhard Self in an unsettlingly matter-of-fact style. Instead of the brooding and tortured soul readers might expect--or even demand--Gerd (as his many friends call him) comes across as wry and likable as he hustles up cases, flirts with attractive women of all ages, and worries about slipping into old age with only his cat for company. It's the early 1980s, and Self has been hired by a boyhood friend to smoke out a hacker who's playing havoc with the computers at Rhineland Chemical Works. But after Self springs a trap that gets the troublemaker murdered, he gradually faces the guilt he still carries for his youthful embrace of National Socialism. His simple refusal to let himself off the hook and step back into his old public prosecutor's role after the war doesn't seem like penance enough anymore. "I had planned to live at peace with my past," he muses. "Guilt, atonement, enthusiasm and blindness, pride and anger, morality and resignation--I'd brought it all together in an elaborate balance. The past had achieved abstraction." But Self's unwitting participation in the new crime drives him to pursue the path of justice wherever it may lead. A fascinating exploration of how people often manage to carve out normal lives even after being complicit in terrible acts. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
As a young man, Gerhard Self served as a Nazi prosecutor. After the war he was barred from the judicial system and so became a private investigator. He has never, however, forgotten his complicity in evil.

Hired by a childhood friend, the aging Self searches for a prankish hacker who’s invaded the computer system of a Rhineland chemical plant. But his investigation leads to murder, and from there to the charnel house of Germany’s past, where the secrets of powerful corporations lie among the bones of numberless dead. What ensues is a taut, psychologically complex, and densely atmospheric moral thriller featuring a shrewd, self-mocking protagonist.

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