SOURCE: Bedford, Martyn. “A Moral Maze.” New Statesman 131, no. 4572 (28 January 2002): 54.

In the following review, Bedford provides a favorable assessment of Flights of Love, but finds weaknesses in several of the volume's selections.

When a Gentile decides to have himself circumcised so that he can adopt the religion of his Jewish girlfriend, he explains the dilemma like this: “Either she has to become like me, or I become like her. You really tolerate only your own kind.” This is the premise of “The Circumcision,” the longest, strangest story in this collection [Flights of Love] from the author of the critically acclaimed international best-seller The Reader. Indeed, tolerance is a recurring theme in Bernhard Schlink's fiction—and not just tolerance, or the lack of it, between peoples, but the uniquely German issue of how the nation achieves a tolerable assimilation of its collective shame over the Holocaust. If it is...