The Pears of Ribbeck

Now that the Berlin Wall has come down, now that westerners — with all car radios blaring — are invading the east, full of bravado and contempt and curiosity, what do the East Germans think, caught in the cul-de-sac of history. Delius, recognized as a major contemporary German writer, is the first to explore this situation in fiction. The novel is the rambling, musing monologue of a man who might be Mother Courage’s cousin, a man who is seeing it all for a second, a third time, as history rumbles on.