Why a Booktrail?
1988 onwards: The Fall of the Berlin Wall is to come, but it’s what passes before that is even more interesting..
1988 onwards: The Fall of the Berlin Wall is to come, but it’s what passes before that is even more interesting..
‘Pleasured begins on New Year’s Eve, 1988, when a car breaks down on a road connecting West Germany and West Berlin. Inside the car are an unlikely trio – Peter Picker, an Englishman, and the two strangers to whom he is giving a lift, a student who calls herself Daphne and Friedrich Kaiser. The novel tracks their intertwined fates in the year that follows. It is, of course, no ordinary year, and it is not only the Berlin Wall which has collapsed by its end…
Friedrich Kaiser, is a Generation X slacker living in the hedonistic atmosphere of Kreuzberg in West Berlin.
“The car drew to a standstill. The moment of fear and memory and excitement was gone. He was a stuck in the middle of a vast and terrifyingly foreign country, on an East German transit road between the borders of West Germany and West Berlin, with two strangers, on New Year’s Eve. The worst place, the worst time,the worst people. Friedrich and the driver looked in front of them, looking at the snow which was just beginning to settle.”
Berlin
“I live in Berlin because it suits me, and because I’m interested in the policial situation”
Destination: Berlin Author/Guide: Philip Hensher Departure Time: 1988 onwards
Back to Results