Once gray and ancient, then pummeled by war and dictatorship, it’s now bathed in ever-more exotic colors and Us It’s the country that’s been born during the course of Schlink’s lifetime. The feel of a century of German history is captured in those few sentences. “Nonetheless, the river flowed through the city just as it had before, the little streets were as narrow, and the path up to the castle as steep…” “The houses were no longer gray, they were white and yellow and ocher, even green and blue,” he writes, describing a woman’s visit to a German town she hasn’t seen in six decades. Schlink is a subtle writer, and often he accomplishes this goal with the simplest of images. The psychic infrastructure of an entire country is gradually revealed, one carefully crafted sentence at a time. And these stories often feel flat and vacant.Īs the collection progresses, however, Schlink enters ever-richer emotional territory. Unfortunately, Schlink’s younger characters lack the expressiveness, the sense of humor and the idiosyncrasies of Chekhov’s Russians - or even of Schlink’s older Germans. The first few describe the kind of love affairs that Chekhov wrote about - romances that begin with a chance summer meeting. Not all the stories in “Summer Lies” are that successful. It’s as tender and deeply moving a celebration of the human spirit at the beginning of the 21st century as anyone might hope to read. And yet the story moves toward an emotional conclusion. She interrupts the neatly choreographed ceremony her children and grandchildren have organized to show her their love and voices her frustrations for the first time. If love is obligation, she can’t love anymore. “Love isn’t a matter of feeling, it’s a matter of will.” Finally, at another family gathering, the grandmother decides she’s had enough. The grandmother in “A Journey to the South” - like most of the protagonists in these stories, we never learn her name - remembers her own mother imparting this lesson. You love your children and your spouse because you must. They’ve grown up with the idea of familial love as obligation.

These are not easy realizations for the men and women of Schlink’s generation - the “Nachgeborenen,” Bertold Brecht called them, “those who came after” the war. Only as he approaches the last decision of his life does the professor realize he has to fully open his heart to the woman who loves him. “If this summer’s right, every previous summer was wrong, and if every previous summer was right, this one’s not.” But when he apologizes to his wife for a lifetime of emotional distance, she begins to suspect something is amiss. His grandchildren command his full attention for the first time.

He stops working, finally, and spends long hours gardening. The professor in “The Last Summer” is dying of cancer - and has managed to keep it a secret from everyone who loves him.

ගිම්හාන ගීතය by Bernhard Schlink