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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Amazon Review
Philip Hensher's third novel is set in the divided city of Berlin in the late 1980s. The novel opens with shiftless young protagonist Friedrich and half-hearted terrorist Daphne ambling through their ineffectual lives. Then along comes the mysterious Englishman, Mr Picker, with a plan to flood East Berlin with ecstasy tablets. The theory is that the importation of pleasure will hasten the course of history and liberate the downtrodden easterners from their servitude. It is a bizarre and frankly unlikely plot device, but it does seem to work in the context of this unsettling and astutely realized novel. The many variants of divisiveness--city, country and continent as well as a myriad of psychological versions--are slyly revealed. Philip Hensher caused a literary stir when the publication of his novel about the fall of Margaret Thatcher, Kitchen Venom, precipitated his sacking from his job as a clerk at the House of Commons. This novel may be set on a larger political stage but is equally sharp on a febrile, closed world--Westminster then, East Berlin just before the wall came down here--and Hensher's wonderful facility for observing half-hidden human motivations and frailties ensure that this absorbing book will further enhance his reputation as one of the most thoughtful of contemporary novelists. --Nick Wroe
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 the Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By dazzlebown
Format:Paperback
Opening on New Year's Eve 1988, Hensher's novel traces the paths of three people thrown together by circumstance in a car travelling through the old German Democratic from Westphalia, where all have spent Christmas, to the Federal German enclave of West Berlin. Herr Picker, an Englishman living in West Berlin; Daphne, a class warrior who doubts her own sincerity in the struggle and Friedrich, an amoral, apolitical Kreuzberger are forced into a test of trust when the tyre of the car in which they are travelling (driven by Herr Picker) blows out on a harsh, brutal concrete-slab transit road though communist East Germany, setting a chain of events in motion that evokes changes in the story's protagonists mirrored in the political, economic and social changes taking place in the city of Berlin, the nation of Germany and the whole of the European continent.
Exploring a plurality of emotional, political and intellectual perspectives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent Wende, Hensher does not shirk from his assumed responsibility to present the mixed emotions and prospects of the inhabitants of Berlin and the wider Germany to the fall of the wall that has divided the city's inhabitants for so long. He accurately and insightfully illustrates the inherent interconnectedness of life in a walled city in a way that explores themes of freedom and determinism, trust and betrayal and wraps each secret in layers of half-truth in surprising, rewarding and often emotionally exacting ways.
Indeed, it might be that the single most memorable aspect of this book is the way it demands so much of the reader - emotionally, intellectually and sometimes almost physically.
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