Ginster
Harrowing and hilarious ... Scenes of draft exams are at once taut with meaning and devilishly satirical ... The magic of Kracauer’s work is how much he convinces us to care about Ginster, even if he himself cares so little for anything beyond his own immediate safety.
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In its often fragmented, choppy prose, its hurly-burly atmospherics, and its playfully arbitrary plotting, Ginster manages to distill the metaphysical flavor of an odd, in-between epoch. This helps to explain the book’s dominant affective note — a bemused drifting that runs up against a mounting sense of societal regulation ... Vivid.
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Thought-provoking precisely because its author had not yet developed a theory of collective psychology. Instead Ginster is at once more unsettling and more contemporary ... It is not easy to read a novel about a character who would rather 'dribble away to nothing' ... He is not likeable, but the book avoids the trap of making his lack of heroism heroic.
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