Martin Gülich Die Umarmung The Embrace Schöffling & Co., August 2005, 148 pp. ISBN 3-89561-303-7 Dolf is a thirty-eight-year-old pathology assistant with a low IQ and a difficulty in forming relationships, whose work consists in helping his boss, Doctor Sander, in cutting open corpses and examining their vital organs. He has one friend, Walter, an overweight railway worker with whom he lunches every day and to whom he embroiders on his latest adventures with women. In fact he has had no adventures with women, except for a split-second kiss with one of the female corpses laid out on Doctor Sander’s slab. Instead he makes do with a poster girl named Kristina, at whom he gazes from his bed. He compensates, however, by pursuing a different passion: he is a keen butterfly collector and when pinning his insects on the board is always careful to use enough poison to prevent them reviving. Then, one day, his life is turned upside down when the girlfriend of a stab-wound victim, a blonde beautician called Natalie, comes into the lab to identify the victim and flings her arms round Dolf in her grief. The effect on him, both emotionally and physically, is catastrophic. He gets sacked by Sander for frightening his children and when he discovers that fat, ugly Walter is sleeping with Natalie he goes right over the edge. He does not intend to kill the girl, of course, just to send her to sleep with a few drops of the poison he uses on his butterflies. Unfortunately the plan goes wrong. The skill of this book lies in using Dolf as the narrator, which means that the reader sees everything that takes place from the viewpoint of a man whose neutral attitude to dead bodies is both disturbing and rich in black comedy. ‘We’re not lovers in a film’, he announces after his first embrace with Natalie, ‘because there’s a man lying in Number 12 and I laid him there…His brain… isn’t in his head any more, it’s in his stomach, because it always gets put there…But we don’t tell the relatives that. Who’s interested in details anyway?’ Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night and, even more, the simple Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men come to mind – two names to put Gülich squarely into the top class.