Word: leinlein
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...hero of this novel is Leinlein, aged five, the only son of a middle-class couple in postwar Germany. Leinlein is not an ordinary child: he is clubfooted and a genius; he can plot cause and effect, motive and destiny; and in addition he is endowed with searing powers of social criticism. In short, he is one more incarnation of the fashionable new hero of the German novel: a grotesque, who is helpless, unaccountable to society, curiously cynical, yet devastatingly aware -all because of some deformity...
Gisela Elsner's novel is composed of ordinary events in Leinlein's life: breakfast with Mama and Papa, watching Papa at work, a day with Grandmama, a quarrel between his parents, a country outing with the family. But through...
...Leinlein's terrible and innocent eyes each episode is murderously dissected. Papa eats like a pig while Mama throws up into her napkin with revulsion. Grandmama is a steely old Nazi who relives the past by driving more nails into the crucifix above her bed. Since no one in the family will recognize Leinlein's lameness, every outing is a walk to Calvary at the end of which the child's feet are cut and bleeding; his elders' reaction is to abuse him for his weakness. Detail upon horrifying detail is piled with detachment and cold...
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