Patricia Görg Glücksspagat (Lucky Strike) Berlin Verlag, 2000, 108 pp. ISBN 3-8270-0354-7 Maat, the character whose story this short novel relates, leads a double life. By day a security guard employed to look after the collection of medieval paintings in the city museum, by night he is an addict of television games shows. Through his eyes we experience the juxtaposition of these two sets of images. Maat is a loner, a figure of fun to his colleagues, almost an institution after his forty years' service to the museum, the first to arrive in the morning and the last to go home. It is therefore as much a shock for the reader as for Maat himself when he is suddenly made redundant. Now the images he absorbs by day and by night begin to combine, and as this happens, and the safety of his old world crumbles, we share his sense of helplessness as he is cast adrift with Mary Magdalene in a boat on a stormy sea. Two worlds, seemingly as different as possible from each other. But are they in fact so opposed? Do they not each offer the viewer salvation, one through modern materialism, one through spirituality? As Maat sits on his chair in the museum he is absorbed in the rich imagery of the medieval pictures he sees, experiencing the life of Christ from Nativity to Resurrection. As he lies on his sofa in the evening he answers the trivial questions, identifying with the contestants as they list the objects passing before them on the conveyor belt. Is it so strange that Maat can live in both his worlds simultaneously, till time and space dissolve? His life is a conduit between spiritual redemption on the one hand and crass, unredeemed materialism on the other, and the author's use of contrasting styles - lyrical evocation in the descriptions of the biblical paintings, stark modern language for the crudeness of the cynical games shows - brilliantly conveys this. Small wonder that the critic Andreas Müller has called this subtle debut story 'one of this Spring's little artistic masterpieces.'