Rick Whitaker
Flights OFLOVE by Bernard Schlink (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
It is hard to love a book with as bad a title as Flights of Love. Even “Loveflights”, a translation that more closely resembles the original German title, Liebesfluchten, would give a better indication of what is in store for the reader of this collection of seven stories: intimate, smart, powerful prose narratives as memorable as The Reader, the novel by the same author that was published here in translation in 1997. But given the novel’s miraculous sales after it received the blessing of the United States’s most heeded prophet, Oprah Winfrey, the publishers have apparently decided on a title that might appeal to a large, large audience.
All I know about Schlink is what I find in the note about him in this collection: He was born in Germany in 1944, is a professor of law and a practicing judge, has written “several prize-winning crime novels” (none of which publishers take note appears to have been published in English), and lives in Bonn and Berlin. But even with such meagre information, both The Reader and these stories have an autobiographical feel, as if Schlink is always writing about his eventful life.
All of the stories, as the book’s title urgently alerts us, have a main theme that involves love in one form or another. In A Little Fling a man from West Berlin describes his friendship with Sven and Paula, an East Berlin couple involved politically in the struggle to bring down the Wall in 1989. The two left-wing intellectuals achieve a new level of success after reunification, but along with their prosperity come a loss of idealism and an embrace of what they had previously disdained. After Sven buys a big new car, expensive suits and fancy clothes for their daughter, Paula says: “Our wanting-to-have was never any better than your having, and it stinks just as much now.”
One night the narrator spends the night in their guest bedroom. Paula comes to his room, and they make love; then she returns to her room and confronts her husband about the past and especially a political betrayal. The narrator’s friendship with Sven and Paula disintegrates in the aftermath. “All East-West stories were love stories,” the narrator says, “with corresponding expectations and disappointments.”
Each of the seven stories in this dazzling collection is masterfully composed and truly unforgettable. Schlink has a rare gift for giving his writing a casual, unpretentious atmosphere while gradually building up a serious emotional and intellectual interest in the characters and what happens to them. Schlink is determined in these stories, as he was in The Reader, to address difficult emotional, political and moral situations. His seriousness, along with his gift for avoiding any trace of pomposity, makes his work irresistible. Without worrying too much about appearing original without any clumsy trappings of modernism or postmodernism Schlink is proving his place among the most important living writers of fiction.