Flights of Love: Stories (Vintage International) - Classic Literary Fiction Book for Book Clubs & Relaxing Reading
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Product Description
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
Customer Reviews
Bernhard Schlink is a German lawyer, and has been both a law professor and judge. I couldn't help but wonder how many of his stories are based on real-life dramas that he witnessed, or read about, that evolved in a courtroom. He has subsequently given up his "day job." His "true calling" appears to be defining the human condition, particularly the contemporary German human condition, without the necessity of referencing a legal benchmark. A Danish friend introduced me to his work some 15 years ago, and in addition to this volume, I've also read The Reader by Schlink,Bernhard. [1999] Paperback and The Weekend (Vintage International); the latter I have reviewed. I am an unabashed admirer of his work.This is a collection of seven short stories. Some are uniquely rooted in the German experiences; others address universal themes. All pose serious dilemmas, and many feature, like a good jurist, sifting through the facts, what is known, and only what might be reasonably surmised. Some issues truly are "unknowable." And often the author leaves it to the reader to "be the judge."What did my daddy real do during the war? A universal question, particularly unsettlingly in the German context of the Second World War. In the "re-write" of history weren't all the French in "the Resistance"? The "Girl with Lizard" is a story about a painting that hangs in the father's study. Why is it there, and why is it the one physical possession that the father treasures? His father was a judge in Strasbourg during WW II. Did he obtain the painting as a present, from Jews that he helped escape? Or was it simply part of the booty confiscated from Jews being sent on that long train ride? And there is the matter of the fellow German officer that he sentenced to death? Of the universal themes, it examines how more times than not we really have no idea about our parent's lives before we arrived."A Little Fling," when written, seemed to address another unique German circumstance: the divide between West and East Germany. Of the truly despicable aspects of East German society, there was the universal spying on it citizens by Stasi. It was so pervasion, and no doubt the intention, that spouses could not be really certain of the other... who could justify submitting their reports for their spouses own good. And the Fling? Ah, it is that deep ambivalence a man feels when an attractive woman choses him as a recipient of her pleasures only to realize that it is only a revenge f..."The Other Man" appears after your beloved wife has recently died a debilitating death from cancer. One piece of evidence surfaces, then another, that she had had an affair during the marriage. You're curious. What sort of man did your wife find attractive enough for an affair? And should you seek your own revenge? Nothing uniquely German about this one. "Sugar Peas" is normalcy...and starts brilliantly with the sentence: "When Thomas saw that the revolution wasn't about to happen, he remembered that once upon a time before 1968 he had studied architecture..." Another "universal" story, but there is nothing normal about the successful life Thomas chose within the established world order, nor is it normal the relationship he has with "his" women, and the denouement might be the most bizarre of all. Schlink's stories are rich in details that can bring back a flood of memories, like when I also crashed my bike when crossing trolley tracks at an insufficient oblique angle, and memories, hopefully of the future, when I can hike in the Vosges."The Circumcision" is another story rather unique to the German context, and asks a very fundamental question, considering the mountains of historical baggage that accompany them: Can an American Jewish woman and a German man find happiness. No soap-opera, this story. Schlink DOES do "nuance," and how much depends upon a not much discussed "dividing line" between American and European men: the vast majority of the former are circumcised, and the latter are not. The story, "The Son" was, for me, the only outlier in this collection. It just didn't seem to "work" as well as the others, but that was only by comparison. Schlink closes this collection with another very dangerous fantasy that many a man has had, and is entitled, appropriately, "The Woman at the Gas Station."Schlink surprises, entertains, informs, and even resonates with, possible your own carefully guarded conscious, and consciousness. 6-stars.
