Layers of Love

For American readers, German author Bernhard Schlink has a huge task at hand with his new collection, Flights of Love: to successfully follow up on his immensely popular novel The Reader. Besides Schlink’s liquid prose and fluid character development, the two works are practically opposites, but Flights of Love should certainly hold its own against the huge expectations of Schlink’s fans. At its simplest, Flights of Love is a beautiful and delightfully uncompromising collection, showing a surprising quirkiness that still retains Schlink’s formalistic style.

Flights of Love is a collection of seven short stories, all of which are concerned with different forms of love and their manifestation in sexual and emotional relationships. The stories themselves are, for the most part, fast-paced and free of practically any form of superfluous exposition, which is possibly the collection’s greatest strength. Schlink proves himself completely in command of the odd situations he creates by sparing his readers lengthy descriptions and unnecessary details. This, combined with Schlink’s wonderfully off-beat characters, makes Flights a truly worthy collection. Some of the stories are better than others, however, and Schlink is most successful when he is conscious of his ability to entertain.

Two clear standouts emerge from the collection, “The Other Man” and “Sugar Peas.” All of Schlink’s stories are effective in their portrayal of a specific kind of love; his goal is to show the depths and complexity of love, and how it motivates us beyond rational action. These two stories in particular approach the topic with a bubbling uniqueness. Instead of the more straightforward and realistic parables on the foibles of love, these stories have a quirky sensibility that makes them drastically more entertaining, but at the same time more meaningful.

“The Other Man” is the story of a man who receives letters from his wife’s mysterious, far-away lover soon after her death. This “other man,” who is not yet aware that she is dead, continues writing her letters, most of which are either pleading with her to come back to him, or ponderous rantings on how much he loves her and doesn’t feel guilty about it. Schlink is at his best with his handling of the letters. He writes them with a mysterious coyness that makes the man’s eventual obsession with the letters seem plausible. The man starts writing him letters in response, pretending that he is his wife. Eventually, the man travels to the other man’s home town and befriends him, waiting for the right time to reveal himself. Here, Schlink toys with a genre he hasn’t yet explored in Flights of Love: situational comedy. The story certainly isn’t overtly hilarious, but Schlink obviously sees the humor in his contrivance, and uses it to his thematic advantage in the characyers’ dialogue.

Though it is a funny and touching story, the success of it still lies in Schlink’s ability to dissect human motivation surrounding love. The man’s obsession with his wife’s past, which he slowly uncovers, is at first ambiguously displayed, but eventually Schlink gives us reason for his journey: his own insecurity, his newfound feelings of inadequacy and his flawed, human curiosity. These motivations don’t appear selfish through the careful eyes of Schlink. Rather, they seem pointedly human.

“Sugar Peas,” the true standout of the collection, is a funny and simultaneously tragic diatribe on one man’s emotional polygamy. Thomas is married with children to Jutta. He becomes entangled in an extremely serious affair with Veronika, who wants a larger commitment from him, and after years of his double-life, she gives birth to his child. At this point, Schlink begins setting up Thomas’ ultimate flaw: obliviousness.

Thomas descends into the relationship with Veronika with practically no thought of its consequences, which Schlink writes with a playful awareness. He almost winks at the reader through the page with his treatment of Thomas as a naive prisoner of lust. Eventually though, Thomas seeks escape from both of his lives. He begins a sexual relationship with a much younger woman named Helga, furthering complicating his odd situation.

This three-pronged story confidently weaves between Thomas’ separate lives, and ultimately the reader has a sense of all three; his fatherly life with Jutta, his identity as an artist and eventually a father with Veronika, and his role as an authority figure with Helga, who treats him with a child-like dependency. Thomas’ life becomes highly complex, and he keeps up the charade for no explicit reason, except that he is simply too weak to knock off a couple corners of his triangle. This is most certainly the crux of the story’s charm. Schlink takes incredible joy in keeping Thomas’ motivations unclear. Though this makes “Sugar Peas” far less believable than the other pieces, it also makes it infinitely more fascinating. Schlink asks the reader to come up with the answer in “Sugar Peas,” a refreshing change from his tendency to beat his readers over the head with his interpretation.

Inevitably, Thomas falls. The weight of his triple-life becomes unbearable, and rather than facing the situation, he drops everything and travels the world for a year, with hilarious results. But eventually, his vacation ends; Schlink’s conclusion to “Sugar Peas” is appropriately surreal and viciously funny. Here Schlink adds a layer of sarcasm and thick irony that is missing from the other stories. The result is sublimely wicked; Schlink takes a very subtle, yet decisive revenge on Thomas, creating a more biting and much less thematically obvious tale than some of the other stories.

Though Flights of Love has its standouts and its low points, the collection as a whole is excellent and consistently readable. Schlink has proven that he is an author of alarming substance who knows the delicate layers of the heart. He peels off these layers in Flights of Love, revealing a maze of the betrayals, falsities and pleasures of love.

Published by Pantheon, 308 pp.; $23