RAIN

German author Duve debuts with the tale of a young couple who move to the country seeking peace and quiet, only to find their lives turned inside out.

Two attractive yuppies from Hamburg, Leon and Martina Ulbricht, have recently married and are eager to settle down. Leon is a writer, Martina a production assistant on a television talk show. They imagine their future lying in what was East Germany, where real estate is cheap and plenty of open space remains. So they pack their belongings and hit the road for the town of Priesnitz, where they have bought a house with Leon’s advance for a biography of the Hamburg gangster Benno Pfitzner. (A measure of Leon’s innocence is that, although both the advance and his car were gifts from Pfitzner himself, he is still confident he can write an objective account.) Their first impression of the house is disappointing, but that’s mainly because it’s a day of torrential rain, the surrounding fields a quagmire. So they reserve their opinion for a sunny day—which never arrives. The rain continues unabated, and they soon realize that the stench in the air is coming from the marshes that surround them on every side. Leon finds it difficult to work in such an atmosphere and begins to take long walks in the damp to get his mind off his writer’s block. In the course of one of these strolls he’s accosted and seduced by Isadora Schlei, his older and somewhat obese neighbor down the road. Soon he’s spending less and less time at home with Martina and almost no time at all on his work. Eventually, Benno shows up demanding that he complete the manuscript—or else.

An amiable and good-humored take on an old story, with an interesting West vs. East slant that enlivens what could have been some very stale city-slicker clichés.