Gottlieb Zürn, the hero of this brief but brilliant novel ["The Swan Villa"], is a product of the German economic miracle, a lawyer who switched to real estate and rode the postwar boom to moderate affluence. Having done his bit to help develop the once grassy slopes of Lake Constance into high-rise condominiums, now in midlife he feels depressingly underdeveloped himself, obsolete and disposable, a banal character trapped in a banal dilemma. All Martin Walser does, in limpid prose and with the sure touch of a compassionate surgeon, is to bare the man's heart and trace the pathways of his pain. But in the process he evokes a life in our time, distinct from any other and yet subject to the same laws of supply and excessive demand that govern the lives of the multinational middle class throughout today's global village….

Mr. Walser, though awarded the Group...