MIDSUMMER NIGHT

by Uwe Timm ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 26, 1998

There's a lot of entertainment, and plenty of stringent commentary on the still ""divided"" nature of(unified) contemporary Berlin (""this asshole city""), in this clever episodic picaresque by the German author of The Snake Tree (1990) and The Invention of Curried Sausage (1995). Timm's narrator (and, in a way, hero) is a blocked writer whose research for an article about the potato involves him in a series of comic misadventures (implicitly compared to those in the Shakespearean comedy to which his title alludes) with a garrulous barber, a specialist in funeral orations, a graduate student who's found her calling as a phone-sex worker, and--in a hilarious chapter--an unintelligible Bulgarian munitions dealer. A fine, flinty romp that's also a kind of cockeyed hymn to the larcenous energies of this fractious metropolis and its people.

Pub Date: May 26, 1998

ISBN: 0811213722

Page Count: 288

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998

Categories: FICTION