André Kubiczek Junge Talente (The Young Idea) Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag GmbH, March 2002. 224pp. ISBN 3-87134-446-X Less is a normally rebellious sixteen-year-old growing up in the mid-1980s in the Harz area of the GDR. The novel opens with a description of his day-to-day existence - school, trouble with classmates, first experience of girls. Then his life is turned on its head by the arrival of his coquettish cousin Radost, who invites him to come and visit her in Berlin. When he arrives she is no longer to be found, but fortunately her father, the ex-hippy Wanja, tells him he is welcome to stay. In search of Radost, he embarks on a nervous journey through the Prenzlauer Berg underground scene, going from party to party, meeting punks, anarchists and artists - all those, in fact, in opposition to the regime, from which he also feels alienated. Eventually Less grows tired of this Berlin life. His friends drift apart, one being forced to join the army, another escaping to the West, another ending up in prison. He returns home, but for how long? One ends with the feeling that, disillusioned though he has become with life in the big city, he will not stay in the Harz region for ever. Life for him is just beginning. This rites-of-passage novel is somewhat reminiscent of the pace and style of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City. It is part of a growing trend amongst the younger generation of East German novelists, such as Ingo Schulze and Thomas Brussig, to represent the experience of growing up in the East as - in retrospect - neither traumatic nor cosy and to show, for example, how being a teenager in the 1980s can be recognisable to all young Germans, accompanied as it is by songs by Western bands such as Echo and the Bunnymen and The Smiths. True, it highlights the specific quality of the experience of East Germans, exploring the oppressive nature of the GDR's state institutions. But it also shows that there was a common cultural currency in both the East and the West. The writing is quietly brilliant.