Flights of Love: Stories

Flights of Love: Stories

From the internationally best-selling author of The Reader , here is a collection of stories that weave themselves around the idea of love—love to seek and love to flee; love as desire, as guilt, as confusion or self-betrayal; love as habit, as affair, and as life-changing rebellion. As his myriad fans know from The Reader , Bernhard Schlink’s power as a storyteller resides in his cool compassion and in the intelligence that he wields like a laser to penetrate human motives and human behavior. Here his subject is not history but the heart itself, and with the forensic delicacy of a master he lays bare the essence of our feelings. Already an enormous success in the author’s native Germany, Flights of Love is certain to be celebrated, discussed, read and re-read. Flights of Love sees Bernhard Schlink build on the success of his international bestselling debut novel, The Reader , with a clutch of short stories that tell of the variety of love, distilled into seven splinters of narrative. The pick of the seven, the opening "Girl with Lizard," depicts a remote male character who fixates on a painting of his father's, which he is to discover, like his father, has a familiarly unsavory past, and which he is impelled to exorcise. In the book's centerpiece, "Sugar Peas," architect and amateur painter Thomas finds that his trio of lovers avenge themselves on his profligacy after he is left wheelchair-bound by an accident. "The Other Man" presents a widower corresponding with his dead wife's unwitting lover, and finding comfort through acquaintance. Less successfully, "The Circumcision" sees the pretext of a German man and his New York Jewish girlfriend to ponder huge, chewy rhetoric on the problems of reconciling the past, almost absentmindedly concocting an improbable denouement. Schlink too often presents scenarios rather than scenes, more intent on dislocated dilemma than language. In keeping with his legal training, he discerns lines of attack more suited to a drama, or perhaps a courtroom drama, than fiction. There can be no doubting Schlink's storytelling acumen or his undertaking to tackle the complicated identity of modern Germany. What is increasingly exposed, though, are the supporting mechanisms that too frequently serve to reinforce, rather than challenge, our assumptions with their didactic contrivance. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk Adult/High School-From the author of The Reader (Vintage, 1998) comes a set of seven short stories that delve into the human psyche, revealing love in its many forms. Schlink's characters have deep emotions that are laid bare and picked apart with almost forensic precision. Most of the protagonists are men, young and old, living in Germany. But make no mistake, women have their voices heard as well. The exterior backdrops against which these inner struggles take place vary. In "A Little Fling," a love triangle is set in the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. "The Son" finds a law professor pulled into becoming part of a team of observers sent to a troubled Third World country. "The Circumcision" travels between New York and Germany in a romance that is profoundly heartwarming and heartbreaking. Quirky and often twisted, Flights of Love is a solid collection: every story holds readers fast. These fascinating selections are not pretty, fairy-tale romances, nor are they depressingly dark. Their strange believability coupled with the detached yet intimate style in which they are written feels like amour v‚rit‚. In this collection, love is broad, complicated, and resists neat resolutions. The author's unique writing style and perspective will appeal to both male and female young adults. Schlink has produced an exquisite book that will ground the starry-eyed and lift the sullen. Sheila Shoup, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. An East German wife discovers that her husband informed on her to the Stasi if only to protect her. A boy grows up obsessed with his father's painting of a girl and a lizard, an obsession that shuts out others and eventually leads him to his family's dark secrets. A man reads a letter addressed to his recently deceased wife, discovers that long ago she had a lover, and tracks him down for an encounter that turns into a celebration of the wife's generous nature. Schlink's stories are indeed "flights of love," portraying twists and turns to the normal course of events that then lift people out of their lives. And like the author's celebrated The Reader, several of these works ache with the sorrows of Germany's tumultuous 20th century. Maybe the endings can feel a little unresolved, but in that regard the stories are certainly lifelike. For most collections. - Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. German writer Schlink's novel The Reader (1997) became an international best-seller as an Oprah Book Club selection, a success he follows with a colle