Breakers - Hardcover

Rezensionen

Leaving Germany for a one-semester professorship in German at a San Francisco college brings welcome changes for Helmut Halm. California throbs with life, from the variety of fruit in the market to the variety of women students sprawled on the campus lawns. His German conversation seminar allows him to discuss his many American experiences and also supplies the lithe, tanned beauty with whom he becomes infatuated. Breakers twists the standard "Campus" plot into an amusing view of America from the German perspective. Walser stylishly weaves comedy and compassion, as in his earlier The Inner Man ( LJ 12/84) , but here the California setting will have American readers laughing in recognition of the ordinary rendered fresh with a tinge of absurdity. Highly recommended. Paul E. Hutchison, English Dept., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

English and European novels set in American university communities have become something of a tradition in recent decades as itinerant novelists sojourn here as visiting professors and later go home to tell all. Notable German writer Walser has entered the lists with a feeling, clear-eyed novel of manners, a trenchant commentary on both academia and a contemporary, self-indulgent lifestyle. Helmut Halm, a German scholar in his 50s and a man of wide, general culture is teaching for a semester at a Bay Area university and is greatly taken with the inevitable coedblonde, Porsche-driving, milk-drinking Fran. As much as with Fran, Halm falls in love with California: the eternal sun, the coast and sea, the mellow, laid-back existence. So infatuated is he with its rituals that this repressed Teuton decks himself out in trendy clothes and even undertakes the ordeal of jogging. Life in dark, gloom-ridden, history-freighted, death-haunted Stuttgart is nothing like this. But eventually even here grim realities intrude. Two shocking deaths restore Halm's psychological equilibrium and end the novel on a sobering note.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.