"Why are you looking at me so strangely," Maike asks.
"I'm watching you exist."
I wasn't really prepared for this story. For a start I was not wreathed in the smoke from a spindly Gauloises nor had I nurtured on my chin a tenuous goatee upon which I could drum the soundtrack to existential confusion.
This is a book and a half. The attention to detail - the authenticity of place and character is hypnotic, occasionally irritating but always consistent.
Essentially it is a crime novel with a murder and a kidnap in the centre, told by the supposed perpetrator and the eccentric cops on his tail (one dying, the other just, well, odd).
Physicist Sebastian is told he must kill a man to secure the release of his beloved son. What happens after that is very much a very different part of the spectrum from good old cause and effect.
We enter the realm of quantum uncertainty, the many worlds theory and scientific rivalry in the shape of Sebastian's ally-and-foe Oskar.
I am not a great fan of translations. They read so much like translations. ("Clever clogs" may be the nearest translation to the German original but there are handier, less clunky phrases available in our language.)
However, the distant, one-step-removed Zen language in this book adds to the curious air of dislocation.
This is a novel that will draw a particular kind of reader who will rave as fiercely as others will scratch their heads.
