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Title: A Fancy Pot Boiler
Review: There's a big hole in the center of this book where the personality of the protagonist ought to be. It seems that the author, after having spent time in a German think-tank and needing to mine some gold out of it, hobbled together a novel from his impressions of Berlin, to which he added an incredibly thin plot revolving around the crisis of his 60ish film-making hero. The writing is very, very pretty, but not always clear. Sentences don't just run on but run amok. Everone talks alike. The action, what there is of it, is poorly motivated. There are numerous digressions, while seeming essentials are absent. The saving grace is what one learns about political and cultural thinking in today's re-unified East Germany.
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