The Drinker     by Hans Fallada, Translated by C & A Lloyd Original title: Der Trinker Original language: German Published by Marlboro Press, Inc., The Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.92 x 8.38 x 5.45 ISBN: 091039556X List Price: $12.50 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.50 Published by PUTNAM Pub. Date: 1952 Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering Published by Libris Pub. Date: 1989 Format: Hardcover List Price: £14.90 Not available for ordering

Click on image to see enlargement

The Drinker, the most extraordinary of Fallada’s many novels, was written in a few weeks in an asylum for the criminally insane in North Germany where Fallada had been confined in September 1944 after a domestic incident involving his firing a gun at his wife. In the novel which — as John Willett says in his introduction — ‘has a plan and a shape like a Gadarene slope’, Fallada, a morphine addict and an alcoholic, once a world-famous author, then touching rock-bottom in Nazi Germany, disguised himself as Herr Erwin Sommer, a rather pedantic, petty-minded small businessman, to describe what had happened.

Sommer leaves his wife Magda then falls in love and has a squalid affair with Elinor, a barmaid whom he calls his reine d’alcool (‘Alcohol Queen’). After a series of alcoholically-induced blackouts and behavioural breakdowns, the still outwardly respectable and soberly pedestrian Herr Sommer finds himself in an asylum after apparently trying to murder the long-suffering Magda.

The effect of all this is like reading about Mr. Pooter (the risibly conventional householder in the Victorian masterpiece Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmith Brothers) in Kafka-land, and the denouement is horrific. To conceal the work from the asylum authorities, Fallada seems to have feigned madness. He produced a manuscript which appeared to consist of tiny lines of scribbles, turning each page round and continuing between the lines, and then across them. Deciphering it under a microscope actually took longer than had the writing, but the result was a work of faultless narrative prose. This is a novel with the fluency and inevitability of automatic writing, as seen in the following quote with its obvious disingenuousness, a harbinger of the disasters to come.

‘Of course I have not always been a drunkard. Indeed it is not very long since I first took to drink. Formerly I was repelled by alcohol, I might take a glass of beer, but wine tasted sour to me, and the smell of schnapps made me ill. But then the time came when things began to go wrong with me. My business affairs did not proceed as they should, and in my dealings with people I met with all kinds of setbacks. I have always been a sensitive man...’ p1