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Uwe Timm. Johannisnacht. Cologne. Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 1996. 282 pages. DM 36. ISBN 3-462-02556-2.
Hermann Lenz. Freunde. Frankfurt a.M. Insel. 1997. 223 pages. DM 38. ISBN 3458-16862-1.
It may have been misguided to read Anthony Trollope's "Palliser" novels, Henry James's Aspern Papers, and A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects before turning to these two recent German novels. Compared to the English fictional works, I felt there was something pretentious, contrived, and self-indulgent about the German ones. In a late diary entry Thomas Mann expressed the feeling that he may have been the last novelist to understand the rigorous demands required by a work of art. This can easily be disproved. Gunter Grass and Uwe Johnson, for example, have/had an acute sense of form of which both Uwe Timm and Hermann Lenz display so little. And in their self-centered way, it...