"Now that the final two books of Koeppen's peculiar trilogy have been reissued in English by the publisher New Directions, we can see that it is a triumph, a gem of postwar German literature that has remained obscure in the Anglophone world for too long. These ribald, irreverent, cutting, rhapsodic, and ultimately devastating portraits of German amnesia and hypocrisy, with their long, torqued sentences and jostling casts of doomed characters, were difficult for Koeppen's contemporaries to assimilate. Formally, they were a ferment of hallucination, memory, fantasy, confession, and accusation. Substantively, they had little in common with the pacifying products of a culture that had decided, in the words of the novelist W. G. Sebald, to 'proceed on its way,' after the Second World War, 'almost undisturbed, as if nothing had happened.' [.] Like Joyce's masterpiece and another book often described as its German analogue, Alfred Döblin's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1929), each febrile installment takes place in a single city, and each compresses its action into a one- or two-day frenzy.

Koeppen's chapters are often fractured into short sections, yet these fragments are wonderfully overfull. Their sinuous sentences span pages and veer off into wild clauses, and they are densely allusive, reeling from Romantic poetry to Gertrude Stein to Plato, lurching from one character's point of view to the next. Headlines and advertisements blare out; lists repeat and iterate. In "The Hothouse," a wordless vocalization from Wagner's "Ring" cycle, "wagalaweia," is a frequent refrain--a fitting motif for novels that are not plotted so much as composed. Their many narratives and perspectives tend to converge, as music does, in concluding crescendos. ".