SOURCE: Waugh, Harriet. “Cotton Wool.” Spectator 250, no. 8071 (19 March 1983): 24-5.

In the following review, Waugh finds The Swan Villa unreadable and “simply boring,” faulting the novel's “muffled” style.

Martin Walser is a German writer and his novel, The Swan Villa, has been translated by Leila Lennewitz. The quotations on the back of the jacket about one of his earlier novels indicate that he is highly thought of; and that ‘every paragraph, every incident seems to be exactly right in length, in placing, in mood and in detail’ (The Northern Echo). He is a ‘gimlet author boring into people's veneered exteriors’ (Daily Telegraph).

All this makes me feel peculiarly philistine and shallow because I have to admit that I had extraordinary difficulty in making myself persevere to the end of The Swan Villa. Reading it was an endurance test; where a mountain climber might tell himself that he will not...