Word: fallada
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Story of a Damnation THE DRINKER (282 pp.)-Hans Fallada -Didier...
...Hans Fallada was one of those writers whose books bounce back from the Bank of Posterity stamped "Insufficient Funds." He made the international bestseller lists in the early '30s with Little Man, What Now?, a famously sentimental tale of a harassed bookkeeper whose whimpers found echoes all over a Depression-hounded world. But his talent was timely rather than timeless; moreover, in his native Germany, Fallada and his symbolic "Little Man" pinned their hopes on Hitler, and it turned out to be a luckless choice for both. Fallada's books were pronounced "undesirable" by the Nazis...
While in prison he wrote The Drinker, camouflaging the book by strewing its sentences through a bulky nonsense novel. Unscrambled after Fallada's death in 1947, this novel adds little to his reputation, but its suspiciously autobiographical scent and its candid odor of damnation suggest the careful note-taking of a house guest in Hell...
...shaky step ahead of the D.T.s, Sommer leaves home in search of lifelong bliss with his queen. But his money is soon stolen and he gets into deep trouble. Hauled up on a charge of attempted murder, he is examined and ordered to a lunatic asylum. Author Fallada spells out Sommer's life there in such emetic detail that it makes The Snake Pit sound like a country club...
This trip through the nightmare world of an alcoholic might have had power as well as Kafkaesque pathos if Author Fallada had had the skill to reveal just what makes his hero so spineless. As it is, the neurotic bundle of self-pity and self-hatred called Erwin Sommer is nearly as loathsome as his fate...