Lions of Grunewald
Here is the great Irish novel of Berlin, way back before the Wall came down.
Dallan Weaver, a writer and professor who’s been fêted and flattered but has seen better days, has come to the great divided city as a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Dienst Organization). On arriving, Weaver’s life immediately begins to fall apart. Women fight over him. He is not always in the soberest state of mind. Moving from relatively conventional narrative to deliriously long lists, incorporating everything from children’s drawings to minute recollections of dreams, Lions of the Grunewald is—in the author’s own words—a “missionary stew,” marvelously served up in Aidan Higgins’s inimitable style.
Aidan Higgins, born in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland, in 1927, wrote short stories, novels, travel pieces, radio plays, and a large body of criticism. A consummate stylist, his writing is lush and complex. His books include Scenes from a Receding Past, Bornholm Night-Ferry, Balcony of Europe, and Langrishe, Go Down, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1966 and was later adapted for television by Harold Pinter. Higgins died in Kinsale, Ireland, in 2015.