Flights of Love by Bernhard Schlink, trans John E Woods

Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novel, The Reader, was an extraordinarily potent examination of modern Germany's relationship with its past, as exemplified by an adolescent boy's affair with a former SS guard.

Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novel, The Reader, was an extraordinarily potent examination of modern Germany's relationship with its past, as exemplified by an adolescent boy's affair with a former SS guard. By focusing on the boy's feelings and attesting to the strength of the erotic impulse, Schlink was able to show how conventional moral considerations could be easily swept aside.

Schlink's latest book, Flights of Love, is a collection of seven short stories in which he once again explores the effect of the erotic, particularly within long-established, somewhat stale marriages. A successful architect takes two mistresses with disastrous consequences; a retired civil servant is forced to redefine his life after discovering that his dead wife had a lover; a middle-aged husband accompanies his wife on a second honeymoon in the United States, only to abandon her for a gas station attendant who is, literally, the embodiment of a dream.

The two finest stories follow The Reader in wedding romantic plot to historical investigation. In "Girl With Lizard", a young man discovers that a valuable picture which hung in his father's study was appropriated from Jews during the Second World War. Even before he learns of its provenance, it has caused him to lie to his girlfriend. The painting is a brilliant symbol of the Nazi legacy: not only does ownership give him the same patterns of duplicity as his parents, it epitomises his inability to love.

"The Circumcision" focuses on the relationship between Andi, a German graduate student writing a thesis in New York, and Sarah, a Jewish American computer programmer with family links to Auschwitz. Andi takes a combative attitude to both second-generation guilt and Jewish tribalism: when Sarah's sister reveals that her worst fear is that her child might marry a non-Jew, he wonders what "if he'd said the worst thing for him would be for his son to marry a non-German, a non-Aryan, a Jew or a black?". Nevertheless, he decides to demonstrate his commitment to Sarah by undergoing circumcision, only to discover by her chilling (and, frankly, unbelievable) response that she had never registered the nature of his penis.

In "A Little Fling", Schlink depicts the consequences of German reunification through a series of personal betrayals. A West German judge finds his friendship with an East German couple compromised by the news that the husband, for apparently the best of reasons, has reported on both him and his own wife. The motifs of released Stasi files and unexpected informers are, however, familiar themes of post-Wall literature, and Schlink has little to add apart from an adulterous twist.

The remaining stories display all Schlink's exemplary precision: every emotional nuance and social and professional detail is exactly and succinctly conveyed. Nevertheless, when he strays outside his familiar historical and intellectual domain, the stories have charm and power but lack metaphorical resonance.

Thus "The Son", in which an international peacekeeper in an unnamed, presumably Central American state is killed before having resolved his own domestic conflicts, is a neat conceit which fails to live on the page. "The Woman at the Gas Station", in which a German dreamer abandons his wife while driving down the West Coast of America, resembles an offcut from a Wim Wenders film. The most bizarre story, "Sugar Peas", in which a cheating architect receives his comeuppance from three vengeful women, is an ill-judged venture into Fay Weldon territory.

The international success of The Reader has placed Schlink in an impossible position. It is as unreasonable to expect him to concentrate exclusively on the Holocaust as it is to expect his fellow-Germans to do so in their lives.

One can sympathise with Andi's uncle, who asks of the Third Reich: "Why can't we let it be the same way we let the rest of the past be?" And yet, as the best of these stories show, it is confronting the legacy of Germany's brutal past that gives Schlink's writing its urgency and power.