SOURCE: Zimler, Richard. “Sympathy for the Devil.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (7 October 2001): 8.

In the following review, Zimler offers a favorable assessment of Flights of Love, but deems several of the volume's stories unsuccessful.

Has a woman who committed an atrocity in the service of the Third Reich any right to expect understanding from an old lover who hears of the crime's circumstances years later? And if we as readers come to see how a tragic flaw in her character led her to choose evil, can we permit ourselves to feel what was previously unthinkable: sympathy?

These and other questions raised by Bernhard Schlink's international best-seller The Reader served to undermine the emotional certainties of his narrator and the public alike. Some critics even called the novel “morally confused” because it dared to paint in shades of gray a tiny fictional corner of a historical landscape generally thought...