Product Description

A mesmeric collection of stories about love. In his characteristically unsentimental, elegant and spare prose, Schlink unveils characters and relationships haunted by betrayal and guilt, in situations where self-examination is inescapable. FLIGHTS OF LOVE consists of seven stories, all of them weaving around the idea of love - why people are drawn to it and why some run away. Schlink shows us in turn love as desire, love as confusion, love as a quick affair, love as a drastic life-changing rebellion, love as a force of habit, love as self-betrayal. The cumulative effect is a book which uses effortlessly beguiling language to examine the universal human desire to find a lasting loving relationship, however thwarted that desire ultimately is.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52826 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-07
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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. Despite its title, the collection represents no great departure for Schlink, who continues in a similarly unflighty vein to explore his country's modern history, contrasting mid-life crises with utopian visions to discover unlikely shades of love, streaked with guilt, shame or unconscionable pride. 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 unsavoury past, and which he is impelled to exorcise. In the book's centrepiece "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" sees 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 absent-mindedly concocting an improbable denouement.

And this is the weakness of the collection. Too often, Schlink presents scenarios rather than scenes, more intent on dislocated dilemma than language. In keeping with his legal training, he discerns lines of attack perhaps 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 are increasingly exposed, though, are the supporting mechanisms which frequently serve to reinforce, rather than challenge, our assumptions. Books such as Walter Abish's How German Is It and John Scott's The Architect have demonstrated how such preoccupations can be artfully whipped into stimulating fiction. Schlink's minimalist pieces, while well crafted, generally lack both intimacy and humour, resulting in unleavened fodder, weighed down by intent. --David Vincent

Review
Reviews for the paperback of this are just coming in with ones in THE INDEPENDENT, the following from THE GUARDIAN 'Throughout, he turns tricky subjects into readable stories'Isabel Montgomery, THE GUARIDAN and ''As you acquait yourself with the cast of FLIGHTS OF LOVE you become completely wrapped up in th

About the Author
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. A professor of law at the University of Berlin and a practising judge, he is the author of the major international best-selling novel The Reader as well as several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Bonn and Berlin.

Customer Reviews

A remarkable collection of short stories
Those of you who enjoyed "The Reader' will love this collection of short stories, all of which are abour relationships or obsessions. Some of them are haunting in the beauty, others a little odd-ball. All of them are captivating.

There's something about the quality of contemporary German writers that is quite unique, although I can't quite put my finger on what it is. But these stories are quite deep and prfound but remain easily accesible and a joy to read.

An exploration of love
Bernard Schlink is a German professor of law at Humboldt University in Berlin and Yeshiva University in New York. He is the author of four detective novels, but I came to read him when one of mine friend offered me The Reader.

In Flights of Love, Schlink continues his exploration of love with a collection of seven stories about love, not of love, neither are they love stories. Schlink dispassionately, sometime clinically dissects what love is about, what it makes us do, how it can overcome cultural barriers and prejudices, but also how dangerous it is. These stories are not only about love between a man and a woman but also about filial love (The Son) or idealised love ("Girl with Lizard").

In "Girl with Lizard", a young boy becomes obsessed with a painting that his mother used to call "that Jewish girl". A painting the boy sees standing between his mother and his father. Later, as he grows up and inherits the painting, the painting will stand between him and his girlfriends. A painting whose origin is mysterious. Where did his father get it? The boy knows that his father got it during the war, but how and why? What did his father do during the war? Obsessed with the painting the boy, now a young man, will go on a quest to find the secret hidden behind the girl and the lizard.

What would you do if one day, just after the passing away of your wife whom you dearly loved, you received a letter from her long-forgotten lover? Would you feel betrayed? Would you throw the letter away and try to forget? Or would you answer back and pretend you are the adulterous woman? For how long did she betray you? With whom? When? Why? Tremendous questions when she was everything for you, and when you believed it was reciprocal.

And what if you can't say no? Why couldn't you, like Thomas, have a wife and two mistresses and a successful professional life? Of course such a life requires very good organisation, especially when the three women live in different towns and know nothing about each other. Why can't you have all the "Sugar Peas"? The problem is that each of them wants every bit of you and of your love, and that's spoiling the sweets, your sweets. Then there is only one way to get out of this mess: running away. Until life brings you back to the three of them, sitting around you, looking at you ...

The most captivating story was "The Circumcision". A young German studying in New York falls in love with a young Jewish woman living there. Love will at first overcome the cultural differences, the past and the prejudices. But not for long.

Even if she has always been living in America, Sarah has inherited her past and with it a prejudice against the Germans because of what "they" did to her family in Germany during World War II. Whilst Andy tries to forget what his ancestors did and tries to show Sarah that the world has changed, their differences nevertheless grow to a crescendo.

Everything Andy does is so "German" to Sarah. From his orderly life to his research interest: Utopian collectivism "the [German] fascination of transforming chaos into cosmos". Sarah become obsessed by the Germans, from the tidy German towns to certain German turns of phrase such as "Polish sloppiness" or "Jewish haste".

At first Andy tries to justify the past, his ancestors' behaviour, or at least to explain. But Sarah can't understand, she can't accept what she thinks is unacceptable. Andy can't accept Sarah's prejudices: "You already know everything about the Germans. And you already know everything about me." But " ... how many Germans do you know?"

"Enough, and along with those that we've been happy to get to know, there are the ones we'd have rather not got to know, but got to know anyway," replies Sarah.

Andy realises he has no chance and that there is only one way he can save his love and them as a couple; to give up and to decide that they are on the same ground, to keep his thoughts to himself. He will trim his love smaller and smaller.

This story is the best. It shows how love could be a fragile object and at the same time a dangerous one. How it could help bring two people together but also keep them at a distance. Exacerbate personalities but also erase them. Sarah is obsessed by a past that she hasn't met, and Andy by the same past and a guilt that has been laid upon him and from which he tries to escape. It is a very modern and relevant story in our days of conflict between people who think they know everything about each other even if they have never met.

Bernard Schlink's style is not sentimental; it is realistic, sometimes cold, maybe as the result of a career in law? Above all, Bernard Schlink is honest and pictures life as it is, and more than once I am sure one can identify very easily with the characters. I highly recommend "The Reader" and also "Flights of Love", especially "The Circumcision".

A fantastic debut
Schlink's first novel is an unexpected jewel, and a book which poses serious questions about how much collective or individual blame society can take for atrocities such as the holocaust, and does so in a refreshing and beautiful way. Schlink airs some controvesial and unusual views, but has unerring moral judgement and I couldn't put the thing down till I'd finished it. The twist is well handled and the fact that Schlink doesn't embellish or judge will leave you thinking about this one for days.