An odyssey into the scars of history

Just over a decade ago, Bernhard Schlink published "The Reader," a stunning little novel about a 15-year-old boy who falls into a passionate affair with a streetcar conductor old enough to be his mother. Years after she disappears without warning, he is shocked to encounter her as a defendant in a trial of former Nazi concentration camp guards that he's been assigned to study as a law student.

Schlink's new novel, "Homecoming," continues his exploration of what he refers to as "the scars of history," evident not just on a country's infrastructure but on war survivors and their offspring. This rich vein has drawn such talented literary surgeons as W.G. Sebald, Gunter Grass, Ursula Hegi and Rachel Seiffert.

"Homecoming" shares "The Reader's" concerns with second generation post-Holocaust guilt and is also propelled by a similar compulsion to unravel the mysteries that shroud even the people closest to us. Both novels are narrated by mild, bookish, sometimes frustratingly nonconfrontational males who are often too quick to accept blame and who were born, like their author, in Germany in 1944.

In addition, the two novels share an interest in theories of law and history entwined with a fascination with Homer's "Odyssey," often considered the prototypical homecoming story. Schlink instead proposes "The Odyssey" -- not entirely convincingly -- as a model for the dilatory flux of law. Odysseus, like history itself, Schlink writes, "is clearly in no hurry." He tarries on his homeward journey, visiting various women and, as Schlink notes in "The Reader," "does not return home to stay, but to set off again. 'The Odyssey' is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?"

Despite the shared concerns and similarities between Schlink's two novels, rest assured that there's nothing redundant about "Homecoming."

The novel opens with Peter Debauer's reminiscences of being sent alone to visit his paternal grandparents in Switzerland during his boyhood summer holidays. Life in postwar Germany with his single, working mother is shabby and somewhat joyless. In contrast, the cozy, orderly domesticity Peter finds with his grandparents -- what he calls "the routine of love" -- is something he tries, not always successfully, to replicate in his adult life. He also absorbs their passion for literature and his grandfather's fascination with military history and theories of justice.