Watching the Colour Drain from the Butcher Boy’s Face

Gabriele Annan

  • Lost by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, translated by Carol Brown Janeway
    Picador, 145 pp, £10.00, January 2000, ISBN 0 330 39093 7

‘We all have at least one terrible friend. Each one of us is someone’s terrible friend.’ The epigram was coined by a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge called Jack Gallagher, You could adapt it to the present mood in Europe by saying: ‘Asylum seekers are a menace. Each one of us is someone’s menacing asylum seeker.’ It doesn’t even have to be a Gypsy; it could just be the retired couple fleeing from Guildford who have bought the Tuscan farm across the valley from yours. The asylum-seeker scenario is one of the subtexts in Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s economical, cynical, pitiless and very funny novella.

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