YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollectionsCharacters  Sympathy for the
Devil  FLIGHTS OF LOVE: Stories, By Bernhard Schlink, Translated
from the German by John E. Woods, Pantheon: 312 pp., $23
October 07, 2001|RICHARD ZIMLE | Richard Zimler is the author of
"The Angelic Darkness" and "The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon."  Has
a woman who committed an atrocity in the service of the Third
Reich any right to expect understanding from an old lover who
hears of the crime's circumstances years later? And if we as
readers come to see how a tragic flaw in her character led her
to choose evil, can we permit ourselves to feel what was
previously unthinkable: sympathy?  These and other questions
raised by Bernhard Schlink's international bestseller "The
Reader" served to undermine the emotional certainties of his
narrator and the public alike. Some critics even called the
novel "morally confused" because it dared to paint in shades of
gray a tiny fictional corner of a historical landscape generally
thought of in starkest black and wh