Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Henry and Paul are strangers when they find themselves sharing a sleeping compartment on a night train from Munich to Berlin. When they begin to talk, their stories appear to be variations on the same theme: young guys adrift in the big city, relationships gone wrong, broken hearts. Henry is running away from a triangle of friendship gone sour; Paul is running away too, but as the night unfolds and the train speeds north across the German landscape, his story turns ominous. What he finally reveals to his unsuspecting traveling companion goes into the darkest sphere of human behavior. Shocking and raw, The Bird is a Raven is the work of a writer at the beginning of a stellar career.Synopsis
Henry and Paul are strangers when they find themselves sharing a sleeping compartment on a night train from Munich to Berlin. When they begin to talk, their stories appear to be variations on the same theme: young guys adrift in the big city, relationships gone wrong, broken hearts. Henry is running away from a triangle of friendship gone sour; Paul is running away too, but as the night unfolds and the train speeds north across the German landscape, his story turns ominous. What he finally reveals to his unsuspecting traveling companion goes into the darkest sphere of human behavior. Shocking and raw, The Bird is a Raven is the work of a writer at the beginning of a stellar career.
Publishers Weekly
Lebert became a literary sensation in Germany when his Crazy was published in 2000, when he was 18. This follow-up is, in a word, sophomoric. Two young men meet on a train from Munich to Berlin when they're given adjacent sleeping compartments. Henry asks Paul if he can tell him an involved tale; Paul, in his 20s and more experienced with Berlin and much else, relents out of a kind of restless need for distraction. As Henry drones on about a pathetic love triangle involving an anorexic named Christine, an obese rich kid named Jens and his own problems with his bowels, Paul's attention wanders, and we get bits of his own banal backstory. There's nothing remarkable about Henry's telling-in fact, it's aggressively boring-and Paul's own ruminations are run-of-the-mill dour. The tension fails to rise as Henry narrates the denouement of his problems with Christine and Jens, and a completely unmotivated surprise ending doesn't do anything to redeem the proceedings. This book misses even the club kid readers it's aiming for. (Jan. 25) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.