I read The Lady with the Dog last night. Anton Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog is the book that 15-year-old Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes ) reads to the illiterate Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) on “The Reader”. He reads this to her on the bathtub and on the bed-during their affair while Hanna was advised to stay home due to scarlet fever. The Lady with the Dog is a love affair story between Dmitri Gurov- married to a shrewd and intelligent woman who calls her Dimitri, and a woman with a Pomeranian dog vacationing at Yalta. The lady’s name is Anna Sergeyevna - married to a travelling businessman but no deeper detail why she’s not happy with her marriage. Her sober character and exuberant naivete animates him as they watch the sunset at Yalta every evening from a vantage point. Dmitri described their affair in the end as “only just beginning”- the beginning of more complicated things to come. This book was chosen probably by the author because of the comparative intensity of the affair they had before when Michael was younger and Hanna still was a tram conductor, even before she was jailed for a Nazi war crime.

It’s just saddening that at the end of The Reader, the elderly Kate Winslet hanged herself on the room of the correctional facility during her time of release. I’m not sure if “The Lady with the Dog” was one of those books she piled on the table when she was reaching for the rope from the ceiling before she hanged herself. That jail was where she stayed most of her adult years and where she has been receiving cassette tapes of Ralph’s narration of the books he has read for her.

The ending was really depressing not only because an elderly Hanna hangs herself at that time her sentence ended, but also because how Michael had been indifferent and cold to her during their first meeting after so many years. Michael’s behavior at that day he sees Hanna was just ironic to the sleepless nights he spent passionately voice-recording the books he has read to her during their short affair when he was still a young student.