Bodo Kirchhoff Die kleine Garbo (Little Garbo) Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, August 2006, 287 pp ISBN: 978-3-627-00130-8 How does one blend together, and make some sort of sense out of, the following: the mysterious reappearance of wolves in woods outside Berlin; a thirteen-year-old child TV actress, stage name Malu, real name Marie Luise März; a suicidal, fifty-nine-year-old, LP-playing left-over from the 1960s; a kidnap, a bank robbery, and a killing? Answer: you don't. Instead, you call in that master storyteller and juggler with ideas Bodo Kirchhoff and ask him to do it for you. And of course he turns you in a treat. His handling of his lynchpin character, the depressive Giacomo (originally Jakob) Hoederer, is perhaps his masterpiece. Nothing has gone right for this poor bloke in the whole course of his life. Blacklisted from the teaching profession because of his Communist youth, successively editor of an obscure magazine and chauffeur to celebrities taken up by a famous one (an obvious swipe at Hello!), he is now on the dole and his wife has run off with her therapist. No wonder he wants to shoot himself! In order to reclaim the lady by finding the money to send her on a cruise, he impulsively robs a bank he has entered just to keep warm. Unfortunately the shot he fires as a warning ricochets off a cash-machine and shoots a woman through the heart, so he is now, in addition, a murderer. Next, he manages (inadvertently yet again) to kill Malu's driver and kidnap the girl herself, and before we know where we are (we are, in fact, in those woods) her little dog Lorca is off in hot pursuit of a wolf on heat. There is no way out of this imbroglio except through philosophy. Malu's brother reads Kafka but Hoederer - one up, surely - is an admirer of Hegel and writes 'Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis' on the steamed-up window of her car. While waiting for the hoped for ransom money to materialise the two of them spend the next twelve hours together, and here, in the fairytale forest, frosty and covered in fresh thick snow, things begin to come right. Fantasy, allegory, call it what you will, Bodo Kirchhoff is a marvel.