Too often, a film adaptation will try to imitate the book rather than tell its story. Every scene vibrates with the ghost of the source material. When I was watching The Reader, I didn’t think about the book. I didn’t think about anything that came before, or indeed anything that might come after it.

Kate Winslet’s Oscar-winning, reserved yet powerful performance made me forget everything else. David Kross, the actor who portrays Michael, carries the burden of the main character with grace and intensity. When I finally read the book, I could see the movie in its pages, but didn’t judge one based on the other. They are different forms that use their own unique features to express the same content, just in a different way.

The Oscar-winning film The Reader is based on a book of the same name by Bernhard Schlink that reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller List. It tells the story of a 15-year-old boy named Michael who spends the summer with an older woman, Hanna, making love and reading aloud to her.

He doesn’t see her again until years later, when he attends a war crimes trial at which Hanna is a defendant. A woman and her daughter accuse five women of leaving them locked in a burning church building. Hanna takes the fall for the others because she refuses to admit that she cannot read.

That is the plot. The story is all at once more and less complicated: can a person maintain dignity after doing something unforgivable? How does emotion survive in the face of tragedy and heartbreak? The answer is that most often emotion is sacrificed in order to preserve sanity. Numbness takes its place.

Schlink’s writing is completely lacking in ornamentation, so that the style in which he writes reflects the numbness that describes. Mr. “Schlink tells this story with marvelous directness and simplicity, his writing stripped bare of any of the standard gimmicks of dramatization,” said Richard Bernstein in his review for the New York Times

He only uses quotes when needed for emotional effect, in the same way that memory would usually describe unless the quote was particularly poignant. The chapters jump between thoughts, often beginning with a very unexpected sentence. For example, following a description of a phone call between Michael and Hanna that seems light if not altogether happy, the last chapter begins this way: “Next morning, Hanna was dead. She had hanged herself at daybreak.”

One rather critical difference between the film and the book is the naming of the characters. In the book, most of the characters remain unnamed. He consistently refers to the survivors of the fire as “the mother” and “the daughter”. In fact, he names hardly anyone after Hanna leaves. The names that stand out are the names of the writers and characters in the books that he reads to her. They represent a world beyond a harsh reality, the only place where Hanna and Michael can be together.

If not naming the characters is a matter of distancing himself, the question remains: is it Michael or Schlink who needs to distance? Michael often talks about the impossibility of dealing with life in Germany after the Holocaust. His and Schlink’s generation, which would be the Baby Boomer Generation in America, resented the generation before them for perpetrating or even allowing such horrific crimes. But they were still their parents, their loved ones.

One of the central questions of the book is: if you love someone who caused such pain, does that make you guilty too?

One of the most emotionally-powerful scenes in the film is when Michael visits one of the concentration camps. It is a cloudy, dismal day, and it seems as if no one else is alive. Kross’ face offers more emotion than his character in the book, but it is a confused and ambivalent kind of sadness. As he wanders in silence (the score is non-existent for most of the scene and minimal when it does appear), we understand the numbness as a defense mechanism to deal with such an unfathomable tragedy.

But in the book, that scene is skipped altogether. He recalls it later, but with the detachment of flashback. The only thing he feels at the camps is guilt for not feeling. It is an example of one of the major themes of the book: the unwillingness, or inability, to experience life first-hand, replacing emotion and heart with logic and thought. Michael approaches the trial in the same way.

“It was like being a prisoner in the death camps who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness that he brings to the murders and the deaths themselves. All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life’s functions are reduced to a minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurrences…” (118).

Unlike reviews of the book, many reviews of the film have accused it of being emotionally barren, cold, and distant in the face of difficult moral issues. David Edelstein, of New York Magazine, said “It appears that the filmmakers have taken Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’ way too literally.”

Because of the nature of the form, the book leaves more room for reflection and contemplation. It has room to explain the purpose behind the cold writing. Actually, even though the writing style is straightforward and one-dimensional, the characters have many facets to their personalities.

While in the screenplay Hanna is terse when Michael asks if after years of prison she has thought about her past, in the book she is not afraid to admit that she is accountable to the dead. It is almost as if Schlink is leading us to believe that hers was a crime of ignorance. It’s not excusable, by any means, but perhaps, in some small way, understandable. We go through the same dilemma that Michael does in trying to decide whether to understand or condemn Hanna. In the film, everything is much simpler. Pages of description are reflected in Kate Winslet’s face. The audience can read the words in her expressions.