Simple Stories - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330392700 ISBN 13: 9780330392709

Publisher: Picador, 1737

Synopsis

Set in 1990, Ingo Schulze presents scenes from post-unification life in the small Thuringian town of Altenburg. In a laconic, unsentimental style, Schulze portrays a society marked by unemployment and casual racial violence. Ordinary life struggles to adapt in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, where the deeds of the East/West past are no longer secret.

About this title

Review

Ingo Schulze made his American debut in 1998 with 33 Moments of Happiness, in which he unearthed some memorable squalor, violence, frustration, and (yes) happiness amid the rubble of post-perestroika St. Petersburg. Now the author returns to his own stomping ground with Simple Stories, which takes place in an East German Podunk called Altenburg. At first this novel's 29 chapters appear to be a sequence of unconnected small-town vignettes. But gradually these narratives converge, producing a comical and cross-pollinated group portrait that's anything but simple.

What is simple, or at least simplified, is Schulze's style. The prose he unleashed in his first book was witty, ornate, and occasionally brutal--call it very dirty realism. This time he's produced a more deadpan work, whose whittled-down, first-person sentences are more akin to Raymond Carver than, say, Günter Grass:

It's Tuesday, April 7. Tom is celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday. Two years ago he inherited some money, and soon afterward Billi, his wife, inherited even more. They're living near Leisnig now, in an old farmstead built around a courtyard. Billi takes care of the twins and the garden and gives flute lessons. Tom is still turning out wooden sculptures--gigantic heads with gigantic noses--that he doesn't have to sell anymore.

And so it goes. The very flat, very American tone, which has been adeptly translated by John E. Woods, may be a deliberate mirror of Altenburg's watered-down and Westernized culture. It is in any case an effective vehicle for Schulze's tale, in which great and (mostly) small tragedies seem like aftershocks of Germany's own historical earthquake of the early 1990s. Revolution, the author seems to be saying, is all very well for its cosmopolitan fomenters--but will it play in the sticks? Simple Stories provides at least a partial and hardly pessimistic answer. --Ingrid Broun

From the Inside Flap

r>Prize-winning German writer Ingo Schulze's first novel, Simple Stories, is a marvel of storytelling and craft. Set in the East German town of Altenburg after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it deftly leaps among an array of confused characters caught in the crossroads of their country’s history: a lovelorn waitress who falls for a visiting West German investor; an art historian turned traveling salesman; a former Communist official plagued by his past; an unsuccessful writer who asks his neighbor to break his leg so that he can continue to live on welfare.
Schulze skillfully intercuts an assortment of moving and comic vignettes about seemingly unconnected people, gradually linking them into an exhilarating whole of tidal unity and emotional force, until we see that all the time we have been reading a novel in glittering fragments, spun by a master. With a piercing eye for detail and a magical ear for dialogue, Schulze portrays the tragi-comedy of ordinary people c

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1737
• ISBN 10: 0330392700
• ISBN 13: 9780330392709
• Binding: Paperback