Sleepless Days is a pleasingly exact title for Jurek Becker's fine, grave, funny novel …: it catches precisely the hero's comical, incurable unease in a world run by 'those who looked upon happiness as something for which the time was not yet ripe.' It's a novel which, while describing an unsatisfactory, even ludicrous state of mind with brilliant particularity, firmly and quietly establishes its political attitude. So, Becker had to leave East Germany in order to publish the book: and it's that kind of decision to which his hero Simrock uncertainly advances….

The novel vacillates wittily between Simrock's dogged battles with mental lethargy, and his confused involuntary actions. There are superb comic scenes where he seems hardly to know what he's doing. But gradually, Simrock's comic uncertainty is seen to be a form of heroism…. The novel's admirable and precisely conveyed discovery is that heroism partakes of dubiousness...