SOURCE: Begley, Louis. “Lonely in Germany.” New York Review of Books 49, no. 1 (17 January 2002): 16-17.

In the following review, Begley commends the stories in Flights of Love, which he views as extensions of the thematic concerns in The Reader.

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...