from The Chicago Tribune

In Simple Stories, the long-awaited reunification novel of East Germany’s most celebrated young author, Ingo Schulze draws a town portrait of former East Germans trapped between guilty pasts and bankrupt futures. Set in the years just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the book explores the aftermath of living in what was perhaps the most spied-on society in history.

"You feel like a fly, a fly caught between the window and the curtain," Hanni says, as she departs to sleep with the man blackmailing her lover for petty bookkeeping sloppiness. "It never stops," her lover replies. "And everybody’s watching.

In his first book, "33 Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories, Schulze positioned himself far outside Germany’s cultural and geographic boundaries, writing would-be Russian tales steeped in myriad allusions to Russian masterpieces. He included an opening note ostensibly from a woman claiming to enclose a fascicle of fantastic tales that a German businessman named Hofmann–as in those fantastical "Tales of Hoffman"–had left behind on a train. Schulze made a point of distancing the book from himself and his homeland, perhaps because his collection included operatic spectacles that were sexist, violent and baroquely over-the-top in ways penitent post-war German culture eschewed. In one, a coat-check woman watches Mafiosi in a bathhouse feast on a girl’s belly, then eat her body as well.

Focused on his native Soil, Schulze’s broad, melodramatic vision is replaced by tight cinematic scrutiny, the gaping spectator by the haunted citizen certain of being watched. Simple Stories consists of jigsaw-piece stories, first-person confessions from dozens of points of view interspersed with tight-camera scenes that read like Stasi-file excerpts. They interlock to depict a society of exiles who have lost a home yet are still trapped in their culture’s clandestine power machinations–a people whose logic, like the fly’s, inevitably leads to ruin.

Post-reunification, Schulze’s characters are unemployed or just barely surviving, bewildered by the new system, and terrorized by the random, destructive way citizen vigilantes apply retroactive "justice". They experience not the West’s mythical freedom and prosperity, but the country music version: they lose their jobs, their homes, their wives, their kids, their dignity and their sanity. In a tense, memorable scene, representatives from competing ad weeklies desperate for business sit waiting for their owner, who never shows. Like the promise of money, other hopes are also quickly crushed. When two fishing buddies catch a 56-pound carp, one dies of a heart attack. A journalist named Danny increases her newspaper’s circulation by writing articles about punks and skinheads, but she cannot sign her name for fear of reprisal. Schulze’s Russia was a place where every man could be king for a day, where a customer watches a desired waitress throw off her clothes to perform oral sex on a dying man, crowd cheering. In post-reunification East Germany, desire leads to downfall, and the waitress is a young girl whose romantic fantasies enable her customer, an American investor, to rape and abandon her on his way out of town.

As Simple Stories opens, Ernst and Renata Meurer lug cans of food on a first-ever trip to Italy. They are astonished by their expanding freedom until a former fellow East German tourist–a former teacher in the school where Ernst is a principal–scales a church façade to decry Ernst for having reported him to the authorities for a student’s suspicious note. The book centers on Ernst’s subsequent cascade into paranoia and the dissolution of his family. When the new order eliminates his teaching assistantship, Ernst’s stepson Martin finds a job as a traveling salesman, and his wife cancels her studies, but the makeshift solution soon collapses. After a pricey speeding ticket suspends his license, Martin proudly insists that he and his wife Andrea don’t’ really need a car, forcing her to ride her bike to the grocery store on a dangerous road where she is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Then Martin’s son decides he’d rather live with Andrea’s sister Danny, who works night and day. On a trip to pick up a neighbor’s BMW, Martin tracks down his birth father, who deserted the family for the West when Martin was a boy, only to discover that he has lost him anew, this time to Jesus. In his last scene, Martin watches his mother Renata commit Ernst to a mental institution, then reattach the expensive earrings a new lover has given her as she hurries away.

Danny is obsessed with a knot in the fake-wood grain of her boss’s old Stasi desk, a "crocodile eye" she feels staring at her as he pries into her sex life. The image epitomizes the menace of living in a police state that boasted 95,000 full-time Stasi agents for 17 million people, more than double the number of Gestapo agents in Nazi Germany, which had four times the population. Rather than using violence, the Stasi’s sophisticated mechanism of repression aimed for what was called the "decomposition" of citizens, seeking to paralyze them by convincing them that everything was controlled and watched. Perhaps the most masterful aspect of Schulze’s book is his depiction of how internalized ambient paranoia erodes characters’ ability to exhale. By plunging in media res into cryptic, uneasy scenes that never quite fit together, Schulze forces even his readers to wonder what will detonate next.

Had Schulze not tried so hard to produce a Cultural Statement, Simple Stories could have been a masterpiece. But in a flawed structure that echoes Richard Linklater’s proudly plotless film Slacker, three dozen characters pass the narrative baton. In addition to overpopulation, complicated overplotting dissipates the book’s intensity. The women’s motivations are frequently inaccessible, their voices nearly uniform in John E. Wood’s translation. To add to the confusion, Woods transliterates already-obsolete references where a word of explanation is needed for readers not conversant in East Germany’s quickly disappearing culture.

Then again, working hard to piece together the never-simple story is the experience of hundreds of thousands of East Germans still waiting to peer into the 125 miles of files the Stasi left behind. With snapshots of the confusion, insecurity and sorrow that accompany freedom, Schulze’s mosaic depicts the devastating loss of a people who no longer have a narrative myth to hold themselves together, who can save themselves, as Hanni says of the trapped fly, only by accident.