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Zusatztext “Intimate! smart! powerful. . . . As memorable as The Reader. . . . Dazzling.” – The Washington Post “Powerful. . . .Elegantly constructed. . . . Schlink is possessed with a coolly direct manner of interrogating the confused motives of the human heart.” – The New York Times Book Review “[An] outstanding collection.” – The Wall Street Journal “Riveting. . . . Mature and disturbing.” – Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally best selling novel The Reader and of four crime novels, The Gordian Knot , Self Deception , Self-Administered Justice , and Self Slaughter , which are currently being translated into English. He is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, in New York. Klappentext Bernhard Schlink brings to these seven superbly crafted stories the same sleek concision and moral acuity that made The Reader an international bestseller. His characters-men with importunate appetites and unfortunate habits of deception-are uneasily suspended between the desire for love and the impulse toward flight. A young boy's fascination with an eerily erotic painting gradually leads him into the labyrinth of his family's secrets. The friendship between a West Berliner and an idealistic young couple from the East founders amid the prosperity and revelations that follow the collapse of communism. An acrobatic philanderer (one wife and two mistresses, all apparently quite happy) begins to crack under the weight of his abundance. By turns brooding and comic, and filled with the suspense that comes from the inexorable unfolding of character, Flights of Love is nothing less than masterful Leseprobe Girl With Lizard 1 It was a painting of a girl with a lizard. They were looking at each other and not looking at each other, the girl gazing dreamily toward the lizard, the lizard directing its vacant, glistening eyes toward the girl. Because the girl's thoughts were somewhere else, she was holding so still that even the lizard sat motionless on the moss-grown rock, on which the girl lay half leaning, half stretched out on her stomach. The lizard lifted its head and probed with its tongue. "That Jewish girl," the boy's mother said whenever she spoke of the girl in the painting. When his parents argued and his father got up to retreat to his study where the painting was hung, she would call after him, "Go pay your Jewish girl a visit!" Or she would ask, "Does the painting of that Jewish girl have to hang there? Does the boy have to sleep under the painting of that Jewish girl?" The painting hung above a couch where the boy napped at noontime, while his father read the paper. More than once he had heard his father explain to his mother that the girl was not Jewish. That the red velvet cap she wore, pressed so firmly down into her brown curls that they almost hid it, wasn't meant to suggest her religion, wasn't a folk costume but a matter of fashion. "It's what girls wore back then. Besides, it's the Jewish men who wear caps, not the women." The girl wore a dark red skirt, and over her bright yellow blouse was a dark yellow vest, a kind of bodice loosely laced with ribbons at the back. The rock on which the girl rested her chin and plump childish arms hid much of her clothes and body. She might have been eight years old. The face was a child's face. But the eyes, the full lips, and the hair, which curled against the brow and fell to cover her back and shoulders, were not those of a child but of a woman. The shadow that her hair cast over her cheek and temple was a secret, and the darkness of the puffed sleeve into which the bare upper arm vanished, a temptation. Behind the rock and a sliver of beach, the sea stretched away to the horizon and surged into the foreground on rolling b...
