Christoph Hein Frau Paula Trousseau (Ms Paula Trousseau) Suhrkamp Verlag, March 2007, 440 pp ISBN: 978-3-518-41878-9 Paula Trousseau is the younger daughter of a victimised mother and a tyrannical father who pours vitriolic scorn on his daughter’s dreams of becoming a painter. Her brother has become a drunk, her older sister has fled the family home. The book begins at what is in fact its predestined end, when a former lover is rung up by the French police to announce that the artist’s body has been found on a side arm of the Loire. The rest of the novel recounts the remainder of her doomed career: her postponement of her wedding so as to sit the art school entrance exam; her abandonment of her daughter; the monumental row with her teacher and lover on the subject of the GDR line on abstract art; her lesbian love affairs. The fall of the Berlin Wall delivers the coup de grâce. Her gallery closes, her commissions dry up, and she realises that no longer does she even have joy in her art. Hein’s novel is a multi-layered portrait of a vocation ruined, and an accurate picture of the GDR with all its corrosive contradictions – no holds barred here. Another excellent novel from one of the finest voices from the former East.