Pigeons on the Grass [Paperback]

Wolfgang Koeppens postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael Hofmann There are rare writers who inform and enthrall, even terrify. The gifted German enigma Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1990) is one such witness: candid and strange, allusive, unsettling. Time and again Koeppen stage-manages an unforgettable scene. A kaleidoscopic narrative that follows a disparate cast of characters whose lives accidentally intersect during a single day in Munich, Germany, in 1948. Now available in an inspired new translation, this portrait of despair and endurance amid postwar ruin is nothing less than a miniature masterpiece. Scathing, disillusioned novel ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany.? Almost eerily contemporary in its concerns, and remarkable as a sidelong, searing appraisal of the legacy of the Nazi years, it is a recovered masterpiece. Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history... a forgotten masterpiece. In a many-toned language Koeppen not only depicts a cacophonous world but peoples that world with individuals whose lives barely overlap. The result documents a uniquely German situation; it also, with its echoes of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, reconnects the German novel at a surprisingly early date to modernist fiction. Koeppens voicecold, defiant and relentless in its fury at the deadly amnesia he saw emerge from Germany's ruins after World War IIneither transforms nor imbues the world around him, but rather indicts it. Koeppens prose, as deftly channelled by Hofmann (who acknowledges the perfectly good version of 1988 by David Ward), seems to expand and contract to fill the space offered by each consciousness. Germanys greatest living writer. Those who haven't read this novel cannot claim to know German literature after 1945. Among the earliest, grandest, and most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world. Scathingly beautl)