NP but the Other Nobelist, Gurnah

[Mark Kohut]

This goes out to our German language reading Plisters.

The protagonist of *Afterlives, *who has become a personal servant
of a German officer as mentioned, who likes that he can read, spends an
hour or so
most days of most weeks teaching him German. ...

He says after who knows how long that "one day you'll read Schiller" and
laughs and says he will never be that good, that smart.

War things happen, our protagonist almost dies, spends months in a hospital
and weeks in delirium, during which the Oberleutnant has left him a book....

He learns much later what it is when he is given it by his new benefactor,
a pastor-health worker
who was not going to give it back to him, but his wife makes him.

It is Schiller's *Musen-almanach fur das Jahr 1798. *


PS. This novel is also beautifully about reading; reading as the way to
have escaped his island and literally as a life-saving ability as our
protagonist
is the only one to survive from all his african peers who were in the war
with him and could not read.