Friday, March 28, 2014

Heroes Like Us

By the end of this novel by the East German Thomas Brussig, the pfennig, as he would say, drops. "How could our society have endured for decades if all its members had been as discontented as they claim?" This sentence, in common with what seems to be half the sentences in the novel, takes the interrogatory form and is answered only indirectly. The comic story of a daydreaming young Stasi agent, preoccupied with sex, ends with the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Behind the satire lurk some uncomfortable truths.

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