Ingo Schulze: 'Simple Stories' and '33 Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories'
In the summer of 1995, fifty years after the end of World War II, I travelled around Germany – courtesy of a cultural agency of the Federal German government – meeting writers, publishers and literary journalist on both sides of what was once the Iron Curtain. Practically everywhere I went, the mantra proved much the same. When would we see a new generation of novelists to rival those who came into prominence after the war – the likes of Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard? What was wrong with younger people, had they been seduced by television and the cinema into neglecting fiction? More ...
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Ingo Schulze’s latest book is actually a novel, even though it clearly advertises the fact on the front cover. New Lives follows the life and times of aspiring novelist and failed entrepreneur, Enrico Türmer, before his newspaper empire crumbled and he went into self-imposed exile. The narrative is woven from a collection of letters that he wrote to his beloved sister Vera, his best friend Johann, and to the object of his desire Nicoletta, between January and July 1990. 
