Erwin Sommer es un respetable empresario casado que, a raíz de una crisis personal y profesional, sucumbe a la bebida. Consciente del peligroso camino que está emprendiendo, se abandona sin embargo a los placeres de la embriaguez y el olvido. Su descenso a los infiernos del alcohol lo llevará hasta el manicomio y la cárcel.

Read a swedish translation. A very moving story about a man who turns to drink and loses everything. Full of black, desperate humour but mostly very dark. A very good book. ( )

Resting half way thru. Very intense and unremitting.

Loved this book, although the realism of the tortuous logic of the addict gave me drinking dreams after 22 years of sobriety. It is truly a journey to hell, but the first person narrative is gripping enough that the reader willingly descends with the main character. The characters in the asylum reminded me a little of e.e. cummings' The Enormous Room. (That's a really good thing.) I'm on to the next Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone. Bound to be a joy ride :-) ( )

I read this book very quickly when I picked it up, but was a bit reluctant to do so because the narrator is extremely unsympathetic. The narrator is the drinker of the title, and we spend the whole book in his head. Erwin Sommer starts out as a happily married, successful businessman, then quickly becomes a selfish, violent, stupid, delusional drunk. I have to give the author credit, as the book is in part a brutal self-portrait, and he writes unsparingly about the narrator’s descent. It’s very readable, but is a somewhat unpleasant experience.

The narrator at first gives a quick picture of his marriage. It starts out happily, as they were both very much in love. He and Magda, his wife, started a successful business and bought a house. After Magda left the business and became a housewife, the couple grew apart and the business faltered. Sommer quickly turns to drink after losing an important contract and trying to keep it from Magda. Soon he is drinking all the time and hiding his drinking. Fallada’s depiction of a marriage that moves from happiness to discomfort and quarrels seems realistic, though it is only shown in a few scenes. His narrator’s too-rapid alcoholic is a little too convenient though. Sommer’s selfish actions make him extremely unsympathetic and you don’t even have any other characters to focus on – the long-suffering Magda is only seen through his eyes and Sommer starts associating with just-as-horrible con men and women. Soon enough, he is thrown into prison and ends up in a sanatorium. It was interesting to read about the daily life of Sommer and the other inmates, and his characterization of the various types he meets while incarcerated is also good. The afterward in my copy is very thorough, and there’s an apt quote describing the strength of Fallada’s work –

“The technique is straightforward; it is good old Naturalism, slightly short on imagination, but then the author is not claiming to have written a great work of imaginative literature…This is no artistic masterpiece. But it is genuine, so uncannily genuine that it give you the shivers…It is written by someone who knows that particular world like the back of his hand, yet can keep exactly the right distance needed to depict it…close, but not too close.” ( )