Hans Magnus Enzensberger Josefine und ich (Tea with Josefine) Suhrkamp Verlag, June 2006, 148 pp ISBN: 3-518-41821-1 'I did a good deed yesterday afternoon. It wasn't entirely of my own accord'. In September 1990 Hans Magnus Enzensberger's narrator Joachim, a thirty-something divorced economist and academic, is walking home just behind an elderly lady when a mugger on a motor-scooter snatches her bag. Joachim intervenes - not a heroic deed, he says, more of a reflex action. Josefine K., a former opera and lieder singer, invites him to her once grand but now dilapidated villa for tea, and they have a regular Tuesday teatime date for the next nine months. She has decided opinions on most matters, and no hesitation in expressing them forcefully. Joachim also gets to know her elderly retainer Fryda, who was her dresser in her prime. He discovers that Josefine did a good deed of her own in the past, saving Jewish Fryda from arrest by the Nazis, but she hates to hear this mentioned. Joachim is invited to spend the summer of 1991 in the States, at MIT. When he returns he finds that Josefine has died and that the house is being demolished. Before disappearing for ever from his life, Fryda gives him a record of Josefine singing. Was she really the top singer that he had supposed? The recorded lieder rather suggests she may not have been. All this is told in diary form, in two notebooks. Fifteen years later Joachim rediscovers them, in the process of moving house, and thinks again of Josefine and the mingling in her character of 'lies and truth, intelligence and nonsense, arrogance and insight…But cynical? No, she wasn't cynical'. This is a novel of talk and ideas. Almost nothing happens. But, in the tradition of Thomas Love Peacock, it is a highly enjoyable and entertaining addition to the talk-and-ideas genre of fiction. As his friend, the late Max Sebald, is reported to have said of Enzensberger not long before his own death, 'Yes, he's getting more cheerful as he grows older'. With its glancing intertextual references to Kafka on the one hand and its factual mention of subjects like German reunification on the other, this book is unlike anything he has written before, and it enhances his literary pre-eminence still further.