Volume 45, Number 12 · July 16, 1998
Nesting Dolls
By Gabriele Annan
33 Moments of Happiness
by Ingo Schulze, translated by John E. Woods
Knopf, 306 pp., $23.00
Simple Storys
by Ingo Schulze
Berlin Verlag, 303 pp., DM38.00
Ingo Schulze has been a big success in Germany ever since 33 Moments of Happiness won three prizes in 1995, and sold over 40,000 copies. It was his first book. He was born in East Germany in 1962, studied classics at Jena University, then got a job as dramaturge at the theater in the small East German city of Altenburg—no German town is too small to have a theater. After that he started an advertising weekly, and in 1993 spent six months in St. Petersburg setting up a similar publication there. 33 Moments of Happiness is the result of that stint, a fusion of travel writing and fiction, some of it surrealist, some Chekhovian. The 'happiness' in the title has to be taken with a pinch of salt: the 33 short pieces are as much about the unhappiness created by the end of communism as about the ecstasies of freedom; but mostly about the Russianness of Russians.
Review, 2403 words
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