Jürgen Becker is one of the leading exponents of experimental, avant-garde literature in Germany. As a member of the so-called Cologne School, a loose grouping of authors with similar theoretical views including Ror Wolf, Gisela Elsner, and Dieter Wellershoff, Becker rejects traditional nineteenth-century aesthetic norms for fiction. He practices instead a highly subjective and fragmentary mode of writing, in which plot and characterization give way to an accumulation of bits of reality permeated by the author's memories and ordered by random associations. Becker was one of several writers who perceived a crisis in literature during the 1960s. These writers--besides Becker, the best known are perhaps Helmut Heißenbüttel, Peter Handke, and Arno Schmidt--attempted to restructure radically the form and content of fiction so that it more accurately corresponds to a rapidly changing empirical reality. Scientific advances have, for Becker, eliminated the illusion of...