Critical Essay | Critical Review by Benjamin Markovits

Critical Review by Benjamin Markovits

SOURCE: Markovits, Benjamin. “Are Words Pointless?” London Review of Books 24, no. 6 (21 March 2002): 32-3.

In the following review, Markovits judges Flights of Love to be an inferior follow-up to The Reader, asserting that the collection lacks adequate feeling and depth to support Schlink's larger thematic concerns.

The generation battle, in its particular post-Third-Reich incarnation, runs through Bernhard Schlink's work, both his bestselling The Reader and Flights of Love, a collection of short stories loosely arranged around various break-ups and infidelities. Reviewers tend to discuss the books together, partly because Flights of Love develops plots, characters and arguments already present in The Reader, but mostly because The Reader is better, more interesting even in its failures than this sequel. The Reader is a first-person account of a boy's love affair with an illiterate older woman, Hanna, and his subsequent discovery that she had acted as a concentration camp...
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