I don't work on some sort of contract basis. I have really low expectations of outcome. At the same time, it’s also something that I realize about not expecting very much from what you do. Min Jin Lee: I'm really familiar at feeling discouraged, so it helps. When the cursor was blinking, that moment, what was that like? What did that feel like? How did you motivate to start it again and then again? I want to know what it felt like the minute you threw the draft away and then you had to sit back down at your computer and start over again. You've written it and rewritten it multiple times, even starting completely from scratch in 2008. You’ve said that you worked on the story Pachinko for almost thirty years. Now based in Boston, she will be a writer-in-residence at Amherst College from 2019 to 2020. Born in Seoul, Korea, Min moved to Queens and graduated from Bronx Science High School, where she was inducted into the Bronx Science Hall of Fame, and then went on to Yale University winning prizes in both fiction and nonfiction. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. Min Jin Lee has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and many other notable publications. Her first book, Free Food for Millionaires, was also a national bestseller. It will be translated into twenty-four languages. Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year” in 2017. Min Jin Lee is the award-winning bestselling author of Pachinko, a multigenerational novel about a Korean family and the Korean diaspora. It is only by learning how to read that Hanna is finally able to understand her role as a perpetrator of the Holocaust and the impact her actions have had on her victims.I'm thrilled to be here today with Min Jin Lee. Hanna’s newfound ability to read is especially important as it demonstrates the possibility of remorse through understanding. While in prison for her crimes, Hanna teaches herself to read from Michael’s tapes and begins to learn about the concentration camps through Holocaust literature. The victims of the Holocaust, the concentration camp prisoners, read to Hanna in secret before she sent them off to Auschwitz. Michael, a member of the generation that followed the Holocaust, reads aloud to Hanna as part of their ritual of reading, showering, and sex. The readers within the novel represent three major groups of people involved in the Holocaust: the victims, the perpetrators, and the next generation. The book’s title, The Reader, prompts us to ask who, exactly, is the reader. Similarly, those of Hanna’s generation who perpetrated or turned a blind eye to the Nazis’ Final Solution could have spent their energy trying to understand why they were targeting the Jews, but instead agreed, either actively or passively, to mass murder without considering the consequences, or at the very least without caring enough about the consequences to intervene. Rather than address the problem, Hanna chooses, for most of her life, to hide it, leading her to work for the SS, where she seems unaware of the untold harm she is inflicting on others. Reflecting on the impact of her illiteracy at her trial, Michael notes that the enormous amount of energy Hanna must have spent on hiding her illiteracy could have been applied to learning how to read. Hanna’s inability to read the written word thus mirrors her inability to comprehend situations around her.įurther, Hanna’s illiteracy serves as a metaphor for the willful ignorance of her generation to the evils or existence of the Holocaust. When the judge asks Hanna if she was aware that she had sent prisoners to their deaths, she gives the trial’s spectators the impression that she cared more about the logistics of clearing out space for new prisoners than about the lives of the people she sent to Auschwitz. By contrast, Hanna seems unable to fully understand why she is on trial in the first place and how she comes across to the jury. For example, Michael might be considered a skillful “reader,” as he is able to easily decipher the mistakes made by Hanna and her lawyer during the trial. Reading in the novel can also mean the interpretation of contexts and people, and the understanding of one’s actions and their consequences. These choices - her decision to work for the SS, her false confession to being the leader of the prison guards - prove disastrous and life-altering. Because she is unable to read, she is forced to decline promotions and must resort to jobs she views as “idiotic.” Not only does Hanna’s illiteracy limit her life choices, but her shame for being illiterate pushes her to make certain choices to hide her secret. Hanna’s illiteracy severely limits her options, determining the course of her life. The novel presents the inability to read as a form of dependence.
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