Description: Altenburg in Thuringia, a flyspeck on the map of the new Germany, is Schulze's Winesburg, Ohio. With laconic wit and a tenderness immune to sentimentality, he gives us simple stories (much of the book is carried in pitch-perfect dialogue) about seemingly unconnected people, but that begin to flash with connections to other stories we've already heard, until we realize that he is moving back and forward across time, cross-cutting episodes and lives cinematically then allowing their elements to re-assemble until we see that all the time we have reading a novel in glittering fragments, spun by a master, that is the complete tragi-comedy of ordinary people in nowheres-ville, caught up in last great historical cataclysm of our century.

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