Radek Knapp Herrn Kukas Empfehlungen (Mr. Kukas' Advice) Piper Verlag, 1999. 251pp. ISBN 3 492 04146 9 Against the background of present-day Vienna, where Western and ex-Communist economies and life-styles are still at odds, and the mix of races and cultures produces a desperate struggle for survival among those on the bottom rungs of the social and racial ladder, Waldemar, a naive and pleasant Polish teenager, undergoes his rites of passage. He takes his Warsaw neighbour, Mr. Kuka's advice, and reaches Austria via the battered 'Dream Travel' bus, with a motley group smuggling cigarettes and vodka to finance their trip. The recommended hotel turns out to be a secluded bench by the Four Seasons fountain, which provides him with running water for his bath. Work is hard to find without the approved papers, so he falls in with his smuggling companions, hired as a gang to excavate a swimming pool, narrowly escaping when the police arrive to arrest the illegal immigrants for desecrating a national park. Left without a schilling to his name, he lands a job with a superstitious toy seller, who believes Waldemar to have the supreme gift of finding fortune in adversity. He lurches from one scrape to another in his encounters with two skinheads, a crooked bank manager, and a compulsive shop-lifter. Many of the adults he meets have a grim story, laced with an element of black farce, and their vivid cameo appearances make clear to the reader what Waldemar will soon leave behind. For them the trials are real, ongoing, and offer no hope of escape. Chief among the book's very positive virtues is its sharp visual sense. It captures superbly well Vienna's buildings, parks and streets, with vigorous thumbnail sketches and a sharp eye for different people's characteristic gait and gestures. It is certainly a feel-good story. But it feels good because Waldemar, so decent and so young, has seen enough to know what it is he is escaping from when he returns to the down-at-heel East.