Midsummer Night

An amusing and cautionary tale of one summer solstice night in Berlin.

If this, Uwe Timm's enchanting novel, were a cautionary tale, the tag line would go something like this: Should you plan to be in Berlin on Midsummer Night, the time of the summer solstice – Watch Out! The narrator of Timm's story is a writer who simply can't get started on his next book. So he accepts a commission to write an article about potatoes. He has some interest in the subject because of an uncle who could, remarkably, from taste alone, differentiate one species of potato from another. Since one of the authorities on the subject worked in East Berlin, our hero takes off to do some research. Rushing around the newly united city, he becomes involved in a series of madcap adventures, strange entanglements, and odd, sometimes threatening encounters. Uwe Timm spins a fascinating tale here, one filled with surprise, magic, comedy, and hope.

Peter Tegel fled Sudetenland, a region of the former Czechoslovakia, at the age of six with his Czech-German family. He escaped to Britain to avoid the Nazis and then graduated from Balliol College, Oxford. He has produced translations of German, French and Russian literature. Currently, Tegel is co-chair of the Pushkin Club, a nonpolitical organization in London that is dedicated to Russian artistic and literary culture.

Uwe Timm was born in Hamburg, Germany. His first novel, Hot Summer, was published in 1974. New Directions publishes five of his novels, including the German best selling, The Invention of Curried Sausage, and the award winning, Morenga. After apprenticing as a furrier, Timm studied philosophy and philology in Paris and Munich. He is the 1989 winner of the Munich Literary Prize. He has been called an "extraordinary story teller" (The New Yorker) and "one of the best living German Writers" (Kirkus Reviews).