From Amazon.com
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and according to Klaus Uhltzscht, hero of German author Thomas Brussig's novel,
Heroes Like Us, he was responsible. Klaus feels responsible for a lot of things, not the least of which is his parents' happiness. It is to please his father--an agent with the notorious East German secret police, the Stasi--that Klaus himself joins up. Once there, he has serious doubts about whether
his Stasi is the genuine article or just a decoy to distract attention from the Stasi for which his father works. When the Wall finally falls, Klaus worries that his activities will be distorted in the Western press, so he decides to unburden himself to Oscar Kitzelstein, a
New York Times correspondent. The darkly ribald, satirical tale Klaus tells in
Heroes Like Us marks the strong debut of an important new voice in the postcommunist literary world.
From Library Journal
If this novel is as funny in the original (it was a best seller in Germany), it's pretty funny, and bravo to translator Brownjohn. It's the story of Klaus Uhlzscht, who even as a child sees himself destined to greatness, even a Nobel prize?all evidence to the contrary. It's about coming of age, his moribund, mysterious father, overly-hygienic mother, summer camp, apprenticeship in the Stasi, but most of all it's about his preoccupation with his (euphemism alert!) member?its uses and abuses, ascensions and dimensions, its promises and purposes. The whole is in the form of an interview with a New York Times reporter, the cause of the interview being Klaus's instrumentality in the fall of the Berlin Wall (see Nobel prize, above), through demonstration of his (euphemism alert!) member, grown through surgical error to gigantic proportion, to awed border guards. Book and characters are funny, but it's the diction (and Brussig would appreciate the two puns above), as in Nabokov, that is hilarious. Recommended but far out.
-?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
