The fleeing horse, the Boccaccian falcon of Walser's Novelle, is the expressive image for the frantic blind rush of escape in which the … two main characters [of Ein fliehendes Pferd] are caught up. Middle-aged when they meet again, the school acquaintances Helmut Halm and Klaus Buch have spent the years seeking to elude the constricting forces of contemporary society, though in entirely opposite ways. Halm has withdrawn into himself, building a fortress of fat, as he sees it, from within which he can anticipate the perfect inertia of death. Buch meanwhile has entered a high-speed race for life in his hyperactive pursuit of health and youth.

More or less enviously, each man admires the other's seeming success—Buch Halm's apparent calm intellectual acceptance of life, and Halm Buch's energetic physical engagement in it. It is at this point of opposition that one of the many elements of parody...