Annette Pehnt Ich muss los (I Must Be Off) Piper Verlag, March 2001. 125pp. ISBN 3-492-04326-7 Alienation, love and loss - these three outstanding preoccupations of our time are the subjects of this compelling and psychologically complex portrait. While still a small child the protagonist, Dorst, loses both his favourite aunt, Tante Lollo, and his father. His response is to become ever more distant from those closest to him, refusing to accept his mother's new partner and avoiding the company of his former schoolfriend Gregor. Instead, he roams the city alone, observing strangers in shops, cafes and restaurants and charting their behaviour. Through snatches of conversation and brief glimpses of other people, Pehnt conveys an urban picture of marginalised individuals, unable to establish any form of meaningful communication with each other. Such relationships as Dorst does start are of short duration. He meets and falls in love with a primary school teacher, Elner, but his refusal to share aspects of his life with her and to deliver any form of commitment doom the relationship. At the end he is left travelling alone on the city buses and trams, only occasionally engaging strangers in transitory conversations. Ich muss los is made up of very short chapters (often only three or four pages), which offer the reader fragments of Dorst's life. These snapshots are not arranged chronologically but by emotional association, allowing the reader to build up, by gradual steps, a profound understanding of the character's experiences and relationships. The style is deceptively simple, using a sparsity of expression to achieve effects of extreme psychological and emotional clarity. In this stylistic and structural respect, though their subject-matter is different, it can be compared with Madeleine St. John's The Essence of Things. Both novels pack a hard emotional punch through an incisive understanding of psychological experience and an understated and highly accessible elegance of expression. Its concepts and emotional content are universal, the translation would present no problems, and it would appeal to the British market no less strongly than to the German.