SOURCE: Skwara, Erich Wolfgang. Review of Der Lebenslauf der Liebe, by Martin Walser. World Literature Today 75, no. 2 (spring 2002): 122-23.

In the following review, Skwara contrasts the themes, style, and protagonist of Der Lebenslauf der Liebe with Walser's works since German reunification.

Martin Walser, the major literary seismograph of German soul and Befindlichkeit over the past five decades, has taken on a new challenge in both the artistic and human sense. Whether this new dimension of his oeuvre represents a widening or a narrowing of the writer's scope, Walser is either way on a fascinating new path, and he takes us along. If sorrows or pains pertaining to German society at large motivated and inspired his earlier novels, novellas, and plays, his new and additional gain in territory became apparent one decade ago, when in his novel Die Verteidigung der Kindheit (1991, see WLT 66:2, p. 334) he no longer told the...