Set in Berlin in the late 80s, this novel tells the story of Heinrich Himmler, a restless young man working part-time as a waiter, who takes on a mysterious errand for the shady Mr Picker. But Picker is a spy for an unspecified government, yet his plan goes humorously awry.
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Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Philip Hensher's third novel, Pleasured is perhaps the finest literary response to one of the most momentous events of the post-war period. Set in Berlin months before the fall of the Wall, it follows the lives of a disparate collection of characters, centring on Friedrich Kaiser, a Generation X slacker living in the hedonistic atmosphere of Kreuzberg in West Berlin. Hitchhiking back to Berlin from Cologne over New Year, Friedrich strikes up an unlikely relationship with the mysterious, rotund Peter Picker and Daphne, a wannabe urban terrorist. As Friedrich's incongruous relationship with Picker blossoms, they hatch an unlikely plan to free East Berlin from its Stalinist grip through the introduction of a little joy in the shape of a bag of Ecstasy.
Pleasured will undoubtedly draw comparisons with Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, with its brilliant evocation of 80s Berlin and the frustration and ennui which defines its comical, degenerate and often desperate collection of characters. Like Isherwood's novel Hensher vividly captures the Zeitgeist of Germany's painful reunification and the personal impact which the fall of the Wall had in both the East and the West. However, Pleasured is more than a meditation on the state of the German nation. It is also a wickedly observed comedy of manners, embracing drugs, terrorism, childhood, fatherhood and the vicissitudes of sexual identity in a series of elegantly drawn portraits and set pieces. Effortlessly written and beautifully structured, this is a great novel, which confirms Hensher as one of the finest novelists currently writing in English. -- Jerry Brotton
Review
'What starts out as a Pinteresque thriller turns out to be a rather touching love story… so good it gives you goosebumps.' Time Out
'Hensher's most ambitious novel to date, it is also his most satisfying' Alex Clarke, Guardian
'Highly original and accomplished… An engrossing read.' Barry Unsworth, Daily Telegraph
'A sublimely structured and sophisticated novel' Independent on Sunday
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
The actions of two petty saboteurs fighting for social justice in the face of capitalism, a seamy English business man in love with Germany and a distracted young man who has come to West Berlin ostensibly to dodge military service, are played out against the back drop of political change that climaxes in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mario and Daphne carry out almost insignificant atrocities against the plague of 'yuppy' cafés spreading across West Berlin in the name of Class War. Daphne has met Friedrich hitching from Cologne with Peter Picker, an English man who plans with Friedrich to bring about the collapse of communism in the DDR by introducing the drug Ecstasy.
The book continues as a series of barely connected events, linked principally to the main protagonists and their pasts. As the Berlin Wall collapses, each of them has to reassess as the political system and status quo that they fought or sheltered under changes forever.
But is anyone ever 'pleasured'? The encounters seem nearly devoid of emotion, as meaningless as they are apparently random. In this respect, Hensher seems too far detached, and prone to let his prose ramble. Then he returns with an insight into his characters, into love, into Germany itself, that goes someway into justifying this ambitious book.
As one of the most important events at the end of the twentieth century unfolds, Hensher questions the impetus behind it, curiously comparing the state endorsed destruction of the Wall with the endorsement of hatred and destruction by a different German state that resulted in Crystal Night over fifty years previously.
But it is in the minutiae, the day to day details of the lives of those who people the book where Hensher succeeds most. This is where the reader can truly be 'pleasured'.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
I think a corrective should be added to the existing review of Philip Hensher's Pleasured! Few authors have written so convincingly and evocatively about a a specific time and place as Hensher's portrait of 80s Berlin. The man's prose is a dream and that alone should be worth the price of a paperback.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I think very highly of Philip Hensher from what I've read of his so far (this one, Kitchen Venom and Other Lulus) - I'm just about to start on the Mulberry Empire. He is a thoughtful, quite sparse writer with a very unusual voice. If anything he makes me think of European writers like Kafka, Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass or W G Sebald. Pleasured, set in Berlin at the end of the cold war era, marries a sad desolation with odd moments of humour. There is great poignance to a mad scheme to 'help' the people in East Germany that is an absurd, but bitterly tragic failure - I guess this event is the most plotted element of the novel and it is very moving. Over all there are more moments of sorrow than joy in Hensher's writing and he is very adept at cutting to the emotional quick. Not fun, but ambitious and compelling stuff.
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