From Bernhard Schlink, the internationally best-selling author of The Reader, come seven provocative and masterfully calibrated stories. A keen dissection of the ways in which we play with truth and less-than-truth in our lives. Summer Lies brims with the delusions, the passions, the outbursts, and the sometimes irrational justifications people make within a mélange of beautifully rendered relationships. In ”After the Season,” a man falls quickly in love with a woman he meets on the beach but wrestles with his incongruous feelings of betrayal after he learns she’s rich. In “Johann Sebastian Bach on Ruegen,” a son tries to put his resentment toward his emotionally distant father behind him by proposing a trip to a Back festival but soon realizes, during his efforts to reconnect, that it wasn’t his father who was the distant one. A philandering playwright is accused to infidelity by his wife in “The Night in Baden-Baden,” but he sees her accusations as nothing more than a means to exculpate himself of his guilt as he carries on with his ways. And in “Stranger in the Night,” an obliging professor becomes an accomplice—not entirely unwittingly—to the temporary escape of a charismatic fugitive on a delayed flight from New York to Frankfurt.
The truth, as once character puts it, is “passionate, beautiful sometimes, and sometimes hideous, it can make you happy and it can torture you, and it always sets you free.” Tantalizingly, so is the act of telling a lie—to others and to ourselves.
About Bernhard Schlink
Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally best-selling novel The Reader. He is a former judge and teaches public law and legal philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
Editorial Review
They meet on vacation on Cape Cod. In “After the Season,” the first of seven stories, Richard is a German immigrant, a flautist; Susan works for a foundation. He’s shocked to discover she’s filthy rich; Richard doesn’t like rich folks, but head-over-heels love sweeps him into a commitment to move in with her, though he’s loath to leave his gritty Manhattan neighborhood; these are his people. Richard is a plausible but not fully autonomous character in a very well-crafted story. Not quite so plausible is the protagonist of “The House in the Forest”; he too is a German immigrant, a novelist like his American wife. She’s successful, he’s not. They find an idyllic country hideaway in which to raise their little girl, away from the distractions of Manhattan; but how can the husband make their seclusion total? Credibility dissolves as his first act of vandalism propels him into madness. The most painful choice is faced by Thomas in “The Last Summer.” The retired philosopher has inoperable bone cancer. Thomas will treat himself to a last summer with his family; when the pain becomes unbearable, he will take a lethal cocktail. His plan goes awry when his wife finds the bottle. Again, credibility suffers when she goes ballistic at a family gathering. Nina’s painful choice came during her youth (“The Journey to the South”). Should she leave her bourgeois family and prospective husband for the happy-go-lucky student she’s fallen for? She chose wrongly and now, a cranky old woman, is eaten up by regret. The fun story is “Stranger in the Night.” The very proper Jakob is transfixed by the wild odyssey of his seatmate on a trans-Atlantic flight. Who could resist the story of a beautiful girlfriend, a swaggering sheikh, a suspicious death and five million euros? And now the stranger wants to borrow Jakob’s passport! - Kirkus Reviews
The Lonely Middle - ‘Summer Lies,’ by Bernhard Schlink
The New York Times Book Review – August 31, 2012 (Excerpt)
Since the success of “The Reader,” Bernhard Schlink has been firmly established as the voice of German guilt and conscience. Not all of his characters are as complicit as Nazi prison guards or the people who unwittingly love them, but it’s difficult for this German writer to use his country as a neutral background for private lives. With his mournful, meditative new collection of stories, translated (like “The Reader”) by Carol Brown Janeway, Schlink comes closer than ever to putting the war behind him. His characters could live anywhere, and in fact many do — in Amsterdam, in New York. They’re still haunted by the past, but the failures they confront are smaller, quieter and adamantly personal.
Many of the seven stories in “Summer Lies” concern diffident middle-aged men who love their routines, love their jobs as second flutists in symphony orchestras or as traffic engineers, and are deeply mistrustful of the women who threaten to pull them out of their comfort zones. Forget passionate sex. “It was years since he’d slept with a woman,” Schlink remarks of one character. “He didn’t feel he was someone who was easily aroused.” Another man whose commuting relationship has disintegrated admits relief: “He would often have been happier if he’d stayed home and read and listened to music instead of meeting her.” [Read the full article...]
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