[Devotion] is a dialogue of the writer with himself, and a brilliant, hard-edged analysis of the act of writing itself. As in his play Big and Little …, Strauss is interested here in the difficulties of communication.

Richard Schroubek, the main character of Devotion, is a West Berlin bookseller whose lover, Hannah, has left him for reasons never explained. His act of devotion to Hannah is the writing of this novel, Devotion; Schroubek introduces it and dedicates it to "H." In a sputtering series of epigrammatic sentences and vignettes that are not more than a paragraph in length, he tells of his misery.

Schroubek's writing is the only action in the novel. The presence of the other characters (Hannah, the cleaning lady, another of Hannah's lovers) is so ephemeral that they seem like Schroubek's private hallucinations…. "Getting a fix on reality never quite worked out," he tells us as...