Michael Kumpfmüller Hampels Fluchten (Flash Jack's Progress) Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, August 2000, 494 pp. ISBN 3-462-02927-4 In March 1962, barely a year after the building of the Berlin Wall, Heinrich Hampel, serial philanderer, shyster and bankrupt businessman, crosses the border to escape his creditors. But note the direction: he is travelling from West to East, thereby cocking a snook at both the 'economic miracle' and the hallowed convention that one 'escapes' from East to West. In this he is acting triumphantly in character. Born in Jena just before the Nazis seized power, he spends four and a half of his formative teenage years in the Soviet Union, of which he becomes highly enamoured and in which he launches his career as a seducer. Back in west Germany he becomes, appropriately, a bed salesman. His flirtation with the market economy proves as fleeting as most of his amorous dalliances as he spends his own and his investors' money on his long-suffering wife and his mistress. In the GDR his bed-hopping continues, but seldom with the same carefree abandon as formerly. His shady wheeler-dealing attracts the disapproval of the authorities, he spends several periods in gaol, and dies destitute and alcoholic shortly before the collapse of his adopted state. Whether one ought to be enamoured of it or not, one of the particular delights of this book is Heinrich's totally selfish yet curiously innocent approach to life. Regarding everything as temporary, he responds instinctively to his desires, unconcerned with anyone's feelings except his own and prepared to keep any political company, even down to that of a state security officer to whom he supplies reports. When his scams go wrong, as inevitably they do, he is always convinced he can bounce back. Equally enjoyable - and truly admirable this time - is the author's accomplished style, which, superficially light and readable, has been crafted with great care. A deliberate subversion of the tradition of the German Bildungsroman, untrammelled by conventions of strict chronological treatment, this book could be hailed as an act of seduction no less effective in its way than Heinrich's own.