A recommendation of my father's that I read in one sitting on a plane from Tel Aviv to Heathrow, which rendered it all the more engrossing. For an insight into 1960s/1970s counterculture, there are few better works. The narrator (effectively Fauser's alter ego) travels from Istanbul to Frankfurt via Berlin and Vienna. Throughout his literary journey (and the metaphorical one of addiction; from heroin to alcohol), the novel focuses on dashed dreams, both personal and political. For sure, the grass is always greener (and perhaps no coincidence that the novel closes with an image of a blade of grass growing through a crack in a pavement, suggestive of redemption), but political idealism is shown as being wholly hollow. As the novel notes, “the lies of the revolutionaries sounded different from those of the reactionaries, but they were lies too.” Relentless and intense, but massively readable. 8/10.
By Jörg Fauser