Michael Lentz Liebeserklärung (Declaration of Love) S. Fischer Verlag, September 2003. 192 pp. ISBN 3-10-043923-6 '...the official end of a love story is the handing over of the keys...' This is the story of love lost, found and lost, of breaking up and starting anew, of declaring love as others declare war. Michael Lentz's nameless narrator has just left his wife, Z, for his lover, A. But after a few months of living with A, this new relationship enters a crisis. As the narrator criss-crosses Germany by train, he reflects obsessively, repetitively and punningly on the failure of his relationship and all other relationships. Rattling back and forth, forever passing through the same towns - Erfurt, Leipzig, Berlin, Manheim - he sits on the train, and inveighs against the evidence of destruction. Love ends in separation, the trains are late, and words cannot be trusted. Thoughts, memories and observations race around the narrator's head, while he moves restlessly, continuously through a Germany that is going to the dogs. The narrator's monologue contains many other voices: fragments of conversations remembered and imagined, as well as quotations from poems and songs. It's all going around and around in the narrator's mind and he is going around and around in the train. At once a brilliant and witty literary exercise, an account of an obsession, and a mental, physical and linguistic journey, this novel is a tour de force. The narrator's ferocious monologue is subjective, egocentric and unfair. With its tough and uncompromising prose, 'Declaration of Love' is as much about hatred as it is about tenderness. Driven by the relentless movement of the train and the fierce jet of words, the narrative is a virtuoso performance: breathless, exultant, vicious and compelling. The crisis between Z and A: is this the language of love?