Read a swedish translation. A very moving story about a man who turns to drink and loses everything. Full of black, desperate humour but mostly very dark. A very good book. ( )

Resting half way thru. Very intense and unremitting.

Loved this book, although the realism of the tortuous logic of the addict gave me drinking dreams after 22 years of sobriety. It is truly a journey to hell, but the first person narrative is gripping enough that the reader willingly descends with the main character. The characters in the asylum reminded me a little of e.e. cummings' The Enormous Room. (That's a really good thing.) I'm on to the next Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone. Bound to be a joy ride :-) ( )

I read this book very quickly when I picked it up, but was a bit reluctant to do so because the narrator is extremely unsympathetic. The narrator is the drinker of the title, and we spend the whole book in his head. Erwin Sommer starts out as a happily married, successful businessman, then quickly becomes a selfish, violent, stupid, delusional drunk. I have to give the author credit, as the book is in part a brutal self-portrait, and he writes unsparingly about the narrator’s descent. It’s very readable, but is a somewhat unpleasant experience.

The narrator at first gives a quick picture of his marriage. It starts out happily, as they were both very much in love. He and Magda, his wife, started a successful business and bought a house. After Magda left the business and became a housewife, the couple grew apart and the business faltered. Sommer quickly turns to drink after losing an important contract and trying to keep it from Magda. Soon he is drinking all the time and hiding his drinking. Fallada’s depiction of a marriage that moves from happiness to discomfort and quarrels seems realistic, though it is only shown in a few scenes. His narrator’s too-rapid alcoholic is a little too convenient though. Sommer’s selfish actions make him extremely unsympathetic and you don’t even have any other characters to focus on – the long-suffering Magda is only seen through his eyes and Sommer starts associating with just-as-horrible con men and women. Soon enough, he is thrown into prison and ends up in a sanatorium. It was interesting to read about the daily life of Sommer and the other inmates, and his characterization of the various types he meets while incarcerated is also good. The afterward in my copy is very thorough, and there’s an apt quote describing the strength of Fallada’s work –

“The technique is straightforward; it is good old Naturalism, slightly short on imagination, but then the author is not claiming to have written a great work of imaginative literature…This is no artistic masterpiece. But it is genuine, so uncannily genuine that it give you the shivers…It is written by someone who knows that particular world like the back of his hand, yet can keep exactly the right distance needed to depict it…close, but not too close.” ( )

The Drinker - Hans Fallada

"Of course I have not always been a drunkard. Indeed it is not very long since I first took to drink. Formerly I was repelled by alcohol; I might take a glass of beer, but wine tasted sour to me, and the smell of schnaps made me ill. But then the time came when things began to go wrong with me. My business affairs did not proceed as they should, and in my dealings with people I met with all kinds of setbacks. I always have been a sensitive man, needing the sympathy and encouragement of those around me, though of course I did not show this and liked to appear rather sure and self-possessed. Worst of all, the feeling gradually grew on me that even my wife was turning away from me. At first the signs were almost unnoticeable, little things that anyone else would have overlooked. For instance, at a birthday party in our house, she forgot to offer me cake. I never eat cake, but hitherto, despite that, she had always offered it me. And once, for three days there was a cobweb in my room, above the stove. I went through all the rooms in the house, but there was not a cobweb in any of them, only in mine. I meant to wait and see how long she intended to annoy me with this, but on the fourth day I could hold out no longer, and I was obliged to tell her of it. Then the cobweb was removed. Naturally I spoke to her very firmly. At all costs I wanted to avoid showing how much I suffered through these insults and my growing isolation."

The Drinker is a gripping read. A novel of two hundred and eighty-two pages about a descent into total degradation written by a man who named himself after a murdered horse may not sound promising, but I do recommend it. The narrator is Herr Sommer, the owner of a small business which he built up with his wife, but which she has now left to run their house. Sommer knows that his wife is better at many important aspects of the business than he, she is efficient, good with people, and makes the effort to deal with customers and suppliers directly. He is proud and awkward, and has not bothered to keep up contacts. An important contract to supply the local prison is up for renewal, a contract which the Sommers have had for nine years, and while his wife had visited the prison governor every time the contract was due to be renewed, Sommer just gets out a tender quote his wife submitted three years ago, copies it over, and mails it. Unsurprisingly, the contract is lost. The bank then refuses to cash Sommer's cheque. Sommer cannot admit his failure to his wife. At dinner that night, after yet another quarrel, Sommers suddenly thinks of a bottle of red wine in the basement, and, unsure why the idea has come to him, suggests to his wife that they have it with the meal. For the first time wine doesn't seem sour, and on a mere glass and a half the world seems good. The following day he visits a tavern, and after downing a noggin of beer moves on to schnaps. Alcohol takes control of him very quickly. He must now conceal his drinking as well as the business failure.

The energy of the novel comes from Sommer's rapid shifts in perception, like looking at the world through a constantly turning kaleidoscope. He hides his drinking from his wife, he is ashamed. He wants her to discover his drinking, he wants her help. He wants her to discover his drinking so she will feel shocked and guilty, because it's her fault that he is drinking, she has turned him into this wreck with all her efficiency and her coldness. She is scheming to make a wreck of him so she can take over the business.

Sommer eludes his wife's attempts to get him to the doctor, and is soon on the unstoppable descent to prison and the asylum.

Fallada knew whereof he wrote. He was addicted to morphine, alcohol, and cigarettes and spent time in prisons and insane asylums, occasionally combining both in asylums for the criminally insane. Perhaps the most shocking section of The Drinker is that which deals with Sommers' time in the asylum, a ghastly place of total degradation where the forgotten live in filth, malnurished and disease-ridden.

There seems to be a lot of discussion and debate about Fallada and his work. Even this Melville House edition, nicely printed and good to hold, is inconsistent in its information. The back cover says "This astonishing autobiographical tour de force was written by Hans Fallada in an encrypted notebook while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum". The publisher's note 'About Hans Fallada' at the back says ".. (Fallada had) suffered an alcohol fueled nervous breakdown and was in a Nazi insane asylum, where he nonetheless managed to write - in code - the brilliant subversive novel, The Drinker." This note comes immediately after the 'Afterword' written by John Willett who says that Fallada was in a closely guarded criminal asylum on a charge of attempted murder . "It was there that, under the pretence of writing a propaganda novel, he wrote The Drinker, not in code as has sometimes been suggested, but in fine criss-crossed lines to economize paper." Willett is not certain that the novel is intentionally about anything other than its obvious subject matter, despite the temptation to draw parallels with the degraded state of Europe at the time. It is interesting that the 'About..' and the back cover both refer to a Nazi insane asylum, the Nazi reference apparently redundant. Fallada had done time in another asylum for the criminally insane before WW1 after killing a friend in a duel and then attempting to kill himself. Although The Drinker was written in 1944 it wasn't published until 1950, by which time Fallada was dead of a morphine overdose.