The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Flights of Love by Bernhard SchlinkBrian Evenson
Bernhard Schlink. Flights of Love. Pantheon, 2001. 308 pp. $23.00.
The author of the best-selling The Reader returns with a collection of seven stories vaguely linked by notions of connection and love. The stories themselves, though largely traditional in feel and in their approach to character, show Schlink to be a careful and consummate stylist, someone genuinely aware of the possibilities of working within established form. The characters develop and reach epiphanies, and Schlink generally manages, through slight and subtle means, to convey a genuine sense of what it means to be human. “Girl with Lizard” explores a man’s obsession with a painting and the way in which that obsession changes his life. “A Little Fling,” more politically charged, is about relationships between individuals in East and West Germany after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In “The Other Man,” a man discovers after his wife’s death that she had had an affair and begins writing to her former lover in the voice of his wife. The main character in “The Circumcision” secretly has himself circumcised out of love for his Jewish girlfriend, but his show of support doesn’t quite turn out the way he expects. “Sugar Peas,” perhaps the strongest story in the volume, chronicles a man’s obsessive voyage among three women over a long period, ending with him paralyzed. In any case, there’s more to Flights of Love than Schlink’s being a former Oprah choice would suggest. Though he doesn’t move the literature forward as do German-speaking writers such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Arno Schmidt, he makes a good, quiet showing. [Brian Evenson]