Ingo Schulze - Böcker

A heartbreaking and funny first novel from the author of 33 Moments of Happiness which makes us understand what life has been like since the fall of the Berlin Wall.Altenburg in Thuringia is a provincial flyspeck on the map of the new Germany. With laconic wit and a tenderness immune to sentimentality Schulze starts to tell us ‘simple stories’, in pitch-perfect prose reminiscent of Raymond Carver, about seemingly unconnected people. By the end, we know we have been listening to a novel in glittering fragments spun by a master – a complete tragicomedy of ordinary people in Nowheresville caught up in the last great cataclysm of the twentieth century.

Each episode in this dazzling debut collection captures the spark in some tiny detail of everyday life in contemporary St Petersburg and fans it into a story that flares with comedy, surreal passion, heartbreaking indifference and mad Russian excess. There’s a Mafia shoot-out in a disco, as told by a gun-toting Walter Mitty simultaneously thrilled and horrified by the carnage he is creating. There are three devils who appear for an evening at the steam bath, their revelries ending in cannibalism – or is the watching manager just mad?These are sad, whimsical, macabre, bleakly funny stories, all told in a playful and voluptuous prose that is itself a homage to the great Russian masters whom Schulze is honouring – from Gogol to Pasternak, from Chekhov to Nabokov.