Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

When you take a book from a library just by looking at the cover and the size of the book you can never know whether it`s gonna be any good. On one hand you can accidentally jump into some novel that even Joyce would have considered a masterpiece but you can also find yourself in posession of a complete waste of your time. Jakob Arjouni luckily or luck-killy if you like it better that way proved to be a decent writer. He doesn`t aim too high - what he gives the reader in his novel is just some days in the life of a schoolteacher who had some great plans for the weekend but in the end he must face his son in coma, his daughter suspecting him for being a pervert, his wife has been in a mental hospital for quite a while already but now he`s also very close to losing his job. Oh, his car is crashed, his face is damaged after his son attacked him, a middle age woman called him a stinky anti-semite on the phone and he`s found out that he`s gay. No, the last thing isn`t really true. I just made it up so it would be even prettier than it already was. Anyhow, the book starts with a lesson at school where Joachim Linde (that`s the hero) asks his students to utter how the deeds of nazi-Germany affect the Germany of today. The discussion goes extremely wrong when a girl starts naming some boy`s parents nazis and the boy utters how sad it is that the girls grandparents hadn`t been gased in a concentration camp. And after that everything that hadn`t gone wrong already goes wrong after all. What this book lacked in my opinion was a bit of uncertainity - I would like to have my doubts about how clear Linde`s conscience was, but the author didn`t provide enough of that. A good book still.