Flights of Love - Hardcover

Bernhard Schlink

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0708994040 ISBN 13: 9780708994047

Publisher: Charnwood (Large Print), 2002

Synopsis

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. 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 unsavory past, and which he is impelled to exorcise. In the book's centerpiece, "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" presents 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 absentmindedly concocting an improbable denouement. Schlink too often presents scenarios rather than scenes, more intent on dislocated dilemma than language. In keeping with his legal training, he discerns lines of attack 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 is increasingly exposed, though, are the supporting mechanisms that too frequently serve to reinforce, rather than challenge, our assumptions with their didactic contrivance. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk

About this title

About the Author

Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany is 1944. A professor of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Cardozo Law School, New York, he is the author of the major internationally bestselling novel The Reader, which became an Oscar-winning film starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, the short story collections Flights of Love and Summer Lies, and several prize-winning crime novels. He lives in Berlin and New York.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Charnwood (Large Print)
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0708994040
• ISBN 13: 9780708994047
• Binding: Hardcover