Burkhard Spinnen Der Reservetorwart (The Reserve Goalkeeper) Schöffling & Co., August 2004. 216 pp. ISBN 3-89561-040-2 Sometimes you get used to life, and then it takes you by surprise. Thomas Grüter had always wanted to be a midfielder, but somehow he ended up in goal. With amazing good fortune and the requisite talent he made the leap from Second Division to Premier League in record time. But as substitute goalie his place was always on the bench, until finally, after six years of standing by, the big break came, and to the cheers of the crowd he ran onto the pitch. Yet after only one match he had already had enough. He engineered an accident, and never played again. Fribeck’s life has also reached a turning point. He was eighteen years old when he started going bald, but now, nearly twenty years later, his hair is growing back – what do you do when you’re forty-five, on the verge of a divorce and no one believes that your hair is returning? Yet Fribeck’s dilemma is nothing compared to that of Drekopp, who, at the age of forty-two is suddenly made an orphan, or of Kortschläger, who hires a personal trainer to help him to be late. Midlife crises have never been more bewildering than this. The stories in this collection show what happens when things start to go off course. Burkhard Spinnen’s heroes are middle-aged men with average jobs and normal lives: people who have been waiting on the sidelines and who don’t know what to do when the action starts. As the title of one of the stories has it, these are ‘storms in a water-cup’: private dramas in ordinary circumstances, spectacularly unspectacular affairs. A businessman turns to blackmail in order to protect a colleague; a rock-fan searches for years for his idol, but hides the all-important letter when it arrives; and an author writes successfully until he starts to worry about his missing literary theory. In twenty-four different stories The Reserve Goalkeeper reveals how it is to be middle-aged and middling, showing the extraordinary things that happen to ordinary lives. And in as little as three pages Spinnen can tell a tale that is at once funny, moving and absorbing. His intelligent, off-beat stories are practically perfect, and they leave you wanting more.