Volume 49, Number 1 · January 17, 2002
Lonely in Germany
By Louis Begley
Flights of Love
by Bernhard Schlink,translated from the Germanby John E. Woods
Pantheon, 308 pp., $23.00
Flights of Love is the second work of fiction by the German writer Bernhard Schlink to appear in English. Schlink became famous following the publication in 1997, in the United States, of his novel The Reader,[*] published in 1995 in German under the title of Der Vorleser, a German word that denotes one who reads aloud to others. It has no precise equivalent in English. The Reader had the biggest international success of any German novel since The Tin Drum. It would be satisfying to say that the popularity of this short, intelligent, and beautifully written work in the US was entirely owing to critical recognition of its high literary merit. In fact, Schlink's novel received a powerful boost in 1999 from its selection by Oprah's Book Club. Schlink is also the author of a trilogy, Selbs Justiz (1987), Selbs Betrug (1994), and Selbs Mord (2001), which records the exploits of the eponymous central character, Gerhard Selb, a rather lovable former Nazi prosecutor practicing, in the style of the more intellectual members of that profession, as a private eye in an imperfectly denazified Germany. He wrote yet another thriller, Die gordische Schleife (1988), whose protagonist is a lawyer called Georg Schlink.
Review, 3658 words
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