Flights of Love Book

I have never really been one for short stories. Something in them doesn't suit me and they generally leave me with a feeling of dissatisfaction. This collection, by Bernhard Schlink of The Reader fame, could not have made me feel more different. With the thread running through them all, these stories examines our shared, fundamental desire to find love but the many different forms that love, that one, lasting relationship can take. The characters leading these stories are all very different people and yet Schlink is able to draw out this common need in all of them whilst skilfully creating a range of atmoshperes and feelings for the reader. Whilst some of the stories create empathy for the pain and guilt of its protagonists, others haunt and still others are shot through with almost wicked humour.

Of all of them, my favourite to read was 'Sugar Peas' in which the rogue-ish Thomas takes himself off for a year, masquerading as a monk (of the fictitious Order of St. Thomas - vain sod!. He has worn himself out keeping three lives going at once: his family in Berlin with his wife with whom her runs an architectural firm, his 'second family' of Veronika and their daughter Klara in Hamburg, where she sells his paintings through her gallery, and his girlfriend Helga, back in Berlin again, who is young, determined, and whose dental clinic he is financing. When a dreadful accident brings his escape to an end, his self-involvement and selfishness comes back to bite him and we are left in no doubt as to where the power now lies!

The most effecting, however, is probably the story that concludes the collection - 'The Woman at the Gas Station'. This story has such a well of sadness in it as the man in it is confronted by the fact that his life, which has been held together by the rituals and habits of a not unhappy marriage, has not made him happy when a long-held dream comes before him as a possible reality.

This story was a poignant note on which to end the collection, but I wished there had been more.