Following the success of The Reader at film awards throughout 2009, including Kate WInslet scooping the gong for Best European Actress at the 2009 European Film Awards on Saturday night, Fingertips’ Ian Shine takes a look back at its author Bernhard Schlink’s follow-up book, Flights of Love.
The difficulty of coming to terms with Germany’s past was the theme that overridingly permeated Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and it is also the theme that has saturated his next book, Flights of Love.
A collection of seven short stories, Flights of Love chronicles the flawed love lives of various Germans, examining them with the razor sharp judge’s eye that Schlink routinely applied in his professional life away from literature. As well as being a judge he was also a professor of law at Humboldt University in Berlin, and Yeshiva University in New York, before his retirement in 2006.
While his attention to detail and awareness of lovers’ proclivities and sensitivities are beyond reproach, it is only when writing with an eye on the German relationship with the past – their feelings of guilt and need for reconciliation and forgiveness – that his stories seem to burst off the page into the painful realm of the real.
The first five stories all draw on this wound, particularly in Girl with Lizard, The Other Man and The Circumcision, in which Schlink pulls the skin of his stories as taut as a drum. Every word counts, every comma makes a difference, and every breath within the story is felt acutely.
Girl with Lizard tells the story of a young student obsessed with a painting of his father’s. The painting shows the Girl and Lizard of the title, and turns out to have been taken from the Jews in second world war.
The boy falls in the love with the girl and this stops him being able to truly fall in love with any of his lovers: partially because he cannot put up with the sham of hiding the painting under his bed every time a girl comes round – out of fear that they’ll somehow know the painting’s heritage – partially because he just prefers the girl in the painting to the girls he has in real life.
The story ends with him burning the picture, burning the chains binding him to his father’s past, and heading home to begin his life anew.
In The Other Man, a retired widower finds out that his dead wife had had an affair with another man. He begins writing to his wife’s ex-lover (who doesn’t know about her death) in her name, concocts a way of meeting and getting to know this other man, and helps him plan a reception for his wife – all with the intention of humiliating him. Much against his expectations it all ends on the night of the reception; with him reconciling himself with his wife’s death and his own broken relationship with his children. He realises that his wife had simply “shared her happiness in a number of ways,” had been happy with both him and the other man, and had actually brought love into the world rather than shattered love by having an affair.
The Circumcision sees a German have himself circumcised in an attempt to heal the wounds that seem to have arisen between himself and his American-Jewish girlfriend. When he presents her, as it were, with his changes, she claims to have never noticed whether he was circumcised or not. The man’s quiet exit at four o’clock the next morning shows his realisation that getting circumcised under anaesthetic is nowhere near big enough or painful enough a gesture to truly deal with the issues in his relationship.
Just like him, all of Schlink’s heroes in this book eventually come to some point of realisation, they walk up to some kind of pain barrier and have to confront it. Nothing can be changed without pain, and as the protagonist of the final story, The Woman at the Gas Station, relentlessly weeps at the wheel of his car, he has to stand up to his true self and walk out on his wife right then, on a deserted road in the middle of America, in order to face up to his pain and begin his new beginning.
