Flights Of Love by Bernhard Schlink
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What I like about a collection of short stories, over, say, a novel, is that the landscape is wider, if not necessarily as deep. So, with these stories, I was introduced to a range of characters in a range of circumstances, unfamiliar to me yet engaging, and it felt like the writing was true. The prose is straightforward, not particularly decorative or showy, much like many of the protagonists. So, from the author of The Reader, which was made into a well-received movie, seven short stories, mostly with German men or young men as the protagonists, often negotiating the weight of Germany’s history, looking for love, familial and carnal, or to understand love and its betrayals through affairs and flings. They didn’t inspire me to write much about them but I did enjoy them.