I almost tossed aside Bernhard Schlink’s latest novel.  Even now, having finished it, I’m not sure whether my persistence was a good thing or not.  It is, for the most part, a dull book.  The prose is generally flat and lifeless.  I felt nothing for its unnamed narrator, a buttoned-up, somewhat smug German lawyer, who finds himself embroiled in an unconvincing ménage à quatre with a celebrated painter, his muse, and the muse’s wealthy husband. But here’s something strange.  The final fifty or so pages – the denouement – are poignant and moving.  I can’t say they rescue the book.  They don’t, but I would have been sorry to have missed them.