Flights of Love [Paperback]

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.

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".