Berlin Blues

The lead singer of a British rock band offers wryly comic glimpses of a young and thoroughly insignificant Berlin man on the eve of one of the most momentous events in late-20th-century European history. Friends call Frank Herr Lehmann because his 30th birthday is drawing near, though Lehmann finds the honorific-like most everything else that happens to him in this episodic debut novel-disruptive, humiliating and unfulfilling, but not so disagreeable that he can't just shrug his shoulders and move on. When he's had a few too many with his boss one night and a strange dog parks itself in front of him, Herr Lehmann is terrified at first, and then, recognizing another lost soul, shares some Scotch with the beast. A relationship blossoms with a sexy female chef, Katrina, that peaks at a Star Wars film festival and then fades when they can't quite figure out whether they're in love. Late-night brawls with strangely belligerent gays and mysterious men who may or may not be spies leave him bruised but unchanged. A visit from Lehmann's fuzzy but sincere parents is surprisingly agreeable, even when they send him on a doomed errand to smuggle money to a relative on the Communist side of the Berlin Wall. Alas, Lehmann's best friend, sculptor and fellow bartender Karl Schmidt, has become mentally unglued ( We made a perfect team, like Bonnie and Clyde or Laurel and Hardy or Simon and Garfunkel or Sacco and Vanzetti ), but, after Karl smashes his artworks ( 'Deconstruction,' said Karl, laughing happily ), it's left to Lehmann to shepherd the man to a psychiatric hospital ward. Minutes after Herr Lehmann's pleasantly hopeless 30th birthday, the Berlin Wall, a few miles away, comes down. But, for the Berliners of Herr Lehmann's crowd, life will go on . . . and on. Quietly funny and vaguely sad: an existential traipse implying that it's those who have no history who make the world go 'round. (Kirkus Reviews)