A grotesque, comic, nightmarish and morally questionable work, in exactly the way writing about fascism perhaps ought to be.

First published in German in 1962 as Eine Seele aus Holz, the collection established Lind as a major postwar Austrian writer. The title novella follows Anton Barth, a disabled Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis, and Wohlbrecht, the increasingly compromised former soldier entrusted with his survival. Across the collection Lind returns to cowardice, survival, bureaucracy, complicity and the bizarre accommodations people make with political horror. His characters are rarely heroic; they are frightened, ridiculous, selfish, occasionally decent and generally trapped inside circumstances whose moral proportions they cannot quite comprehend. The resulting tone has affinities with Kafka and Günter Grass, but Lind is nastier and more manic: history appears not as a stable backdrop but as something that has entered the nervous system. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim.

Methuen, London, 1985. Paperback. First Methuen edition; first published in English in 1964. Moderate shelf wear, rubbing and creasing to covers, with heavier rubbing and surface loss along the lower left of front cover and wear to corners and edges. Internally clean and firmly bound. Good condition.