Like many in this collection, the protagonist is German and initially the more successful of the two, but he develops writer’s block, and Kate becomes so successful that to escape the pandemonium that has developed around her in New York City, they find an isolated cottage in upstate New York where Kate can complete her third novel while her husband takes care of the house and their young daughter. More extreme is the case of two novelists, the unnamed protagonist and his wife Kate, in “The House in the Forest,” which, as its title suggests, resembles a fairy tale. When he enters into a passionate relationship with Susan, who turns out to be filthy rich, with a “Big House” on the Cape, a duplex apartment in New York City and a career in philanthropy in Los Angeles, he shuts his mind to the sums he’s amassing on his credit card and the streetwise life in New York that he’ll have to give up if he is to be with her. Such is the case in “After the Season.” Richard, a German flautist in the New York Philharmonic “who does not like rich people,” takes his vacation on Cape Cod “after the season” because prices are lower, lodging at a B&B. Some stories are told against a backdrop of harsh economic facts, where even the talented might have to cobble together sources of income in order to live, and men, historically the primary breadwinners, are paired with women who earn more or outshine them professionally. And yet these stories are compelling and affecting, for Schlink, like a surgeon, delves tissue by tissue into the human psyche until the pretense in which we wrap ourselves lies bare. There is not a happy or likeable person in the lot. Schlink’s range is narrow, his key minor. Even those stories that center on romantic relationships among the younger generation - people in Schlink’s stories in their late 30s and 40s - usually contain a distant father or an overbearing mother. These stories are also deft explorations into the relationships between adult children and their aging parents. Schlink, a former judge who teaches law in Berlin and New York City and is best known for his novel The Reader, links these stories by the theme of deception, whether self-deception, deception of others or, more often, a mixture of the two. No such comfort is available to readers of Bernhard Schlink’s new collection of seven stories Summer Lies, which leaves its readers in the same limbo Schlink leaves his characters, awash in uncertainty, ambiguity and apathy.
When linked to the modern short story, it refers to a sudden insight on the part of the main character that allows readers to feel that the story has come to a satisfying end. “Epiphany” is one of those highfalutin’ words that Mark Twain warned us against.
0 kommentar(er)
