The Drinker
Scribe, $22.95 pb, 288 pp, 9781922070319
Fiction
Enemy territory
by William Heyward •
The Drinker, by Hans Fallada – first published in Germany in 1950, translated by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd into English in 1952, unearthed for an Anglophone audience in 2009 by Melville House, and now published by Scribe – is the story of Erwin Sommer, who drinks himself, almost unaccountably, to death. It counts for everything, of course, to know that the novel was written in 1944 in a Nazi insane asylum.
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