"Summer Deceptions" by Bernhard Schlink, summary

This is a collection of seven short stories about self-deception, illusions, and compromises in human relationships, where the carefree holiday season exposes the cracks between loved ones. The apparent ease of summer days conceals the characters’ reluctance to admit the truth to themselves and their partners. The author explored these hidden conflicts in 2010, publishing the book with the Swiss publishing house Diogenes.

Off-season

In a rainy Cape Cod restaurant, orchestral flutist Richard meets Susan. The musician is working on his broken pinky by bending the finger of his left hand before a walk to the lighthouse. Susan lives in a gatehouse near her grandfather’s massive mansion.

In the morning, they drink champagne on a deserted beach, wrapped in wet towels. Susan’s immense wealth soon becomes apparent. She plans to move into a Manhattan apartment together, buy mattresses, move the foundation out of Los Angeles, and have four children. A grocery shopping spree drains the flautist’s credit card.

Richard returns to New York by plane via Boston. A taxi drops him off at his house. Neighbors are drinking beer on the porch, teenagers are listening to a tape recorder, and clematis is blooming in the window boxes. The oboist calls, and his student Maria leaves chrysanthemums on the table in the dark room. The flutist sits on the steps, afraid to go upstairs to his old things. He dials Susan’s number before boarding the plane and begs her to come see him. The connection is lost. The musician opens his mailbox, enters the stuffy apartment, and decides to postpone the start of a new life indefinitely.

Night in Baden-Baden

A playwright brings his old acquaintance Teresa to the premiere of his play about a terrorist in Baden-Baden. The director turns the performance into a grotesque.

Three weeks later, the writer travels to Provence with his long-term lover, Anna. She finds traces of a reservation for a double room at the Hotel Brenner on his laptop. A scandal erupts on the terrace by the village pond in Cucuron. The playwright drives into the Luberon mountains and spends several hours with the young waitress Renée at a village inn. Meanwhile, Anna calls Thérèse and discovers the truth about the lack of physical infidelity.

The writer keeps silent about René. The woman asks him to take her to Marseille airport.

House in the forest

A German writer lives in the wilderness near Vermont with a successful American novelist, Kate, and their daughter, Rita. He brews apple cider in a large vat, scrubs pots, lights the fireplace, and reads fairy tales to his daughter. His second novel has been abandoned to manage the household. Meanwhile, Kate is finishing a book about child adoption in Bolivia.

The man is terrified of the return of the city bustle and the loss of his family. In town, he secretly reads the newspaper about Kate’s National Book Award win.

Wooden roadside barrier posts become his secret weapon. He ties a cable to a pine tree, yanks the dead wood with his car, and cuts the telephone cable in the ravine. At night, near the sheriff’s station, he steals blue posts with a barrier board. The structure blocks a sharp turn onto the highway.

In the morning, Kate takes her daughter and drives into town, against her husband’s orders. A crash is heard a few minutes later. Near an overturned pillar, the writer sees a blood stain on the car window. At the hospital, the doctor announces Kate’s arm is broken and the girl has been saved. His wife accuses him of attempted murder and announces a breakup. The man saws the stolen pillars into logs in front of the fireplace.

Wanderer in the Night

On a flight from New York to Frankfurt, passenger Werner Menzel strikes up a conversation with transportation systems professor Saltin. The plane encounters severe turbulence. An engine failure forces the airliner to land in Reykjavik.

Werner tells the story of the death of his blonde friend Ava, allegedly sold to a Kuwaiti attaché for millions of euros. An elderly neighbor witnessed a struggle on the balcony before the woman’s fall.

A stranger in a baggy light-colored suit appears among the passengers in the waiting room. Werner asks the professor for his passport so he can secretly enter Germany. The professor discovers his wallet is missing from his jacket pocket at the Frankfurt security checkpoint.

Last summer

Philosophy professor Thomas Wellmer learns of cancer metastasizing within his skeletal bones. He gathers his wife, adult children, and five grandchildren at his country house by the lake. The doctor hides a vial of a lethal drug for voluntary suicide behind a bottle of champagne in the wine refrigerator.

A man bakes pancakes from Dr. Oetker’s cookbook, measuring out 688 grams of flour and eleven chicken eggs. A grandfather takes his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Ariana, to a local artist and the old bus station. At night, an unbearable pain pierces his left thigh. An old friend, visiting, plays a piano arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne in D minor.

His wife accidentally discovers a hidden vial behind a bottle of champagne. She accuses her husband of betrayal and leaves with her outraged children. Thomas remains in the empty house, collecting scattered sheets and washing clothes in the basement. The drunken philosopher falls on the stairs, breaking his right hand. The man locks the poison in his father’s box, sends his wife a letter with the key, and throws the second key into the lake with his left hand.

Bach on the island of Rügen

A son invites his eighty-two-year-old father, a judge, to a music festival in a seaside village on the island of Rügen. The young man hopes to overcome years of estrangement and the coldness of conversation while driving. The old man answers dryly to questions about his work during the war and his defense of adherents of the Confessing Church.

The men listen to suites in an empty castle hall, then walk to the white chalk cliffs of Cape Arkona. During a thunderstorm on the way back, the son plays a recording of the motet in the car under the bridge. The father weeps silently in the seat next to him.

A trip to the south

Elderly Nina suddenly notices a fading love for her four adult children and thirteen grandchildren. She lives in a nursing home, suffers from a loss of smell after contracting a virus, and is having a hard time getting through a family anniversary at the Beer Yard. At the reception, the old woman causes a scene after mentioning her ex-husband’s second wife.

A fever puts Nina to bed for a whole week. Her granddaughter, Emilia, gives her orange juice, changes her camphorated compresses, and agrees to drive her grandmother to a university town in the south of the country. It was in this town that Nina experienced a student romance with a one-armed invalid, Adalbert Paulsen, sixty years ago.

Emilia finds an elderly philosophy professor through the department’s phone book. Nina climbs up to the terrace of a cottage overlooking orchards and sheep grazing on the slope. She accuses Adalbert of eloping at the train station long ago. The professor reminds her of a trip to a philosophy congress in Budapest and Nina’s sudden departure with her wealthy admirer, Helmut.

An old woman examines an old photograph of a picnic by the river with a gramophone on a corkboard. Nina returns to the hotel, realizing the truth about her own escape into a comfortable bourgeois life. Her granddaughter leaves for Costa Rica to learn Spanish. Two weeks later, the postman brings a small parcel containing Adalbert’s philosophy book, bound in black linen.