Josef Georg Gallistl [the protagonist of Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit] will doubtless attain a certain fame as the literary representation of the runner doomed to bring up the tail in the West German rat-race. His account of his "disease" is a triumph for Martin Walser's gifts as a humorist: a very amusing, rather sad book about the competitiveness that has run wild in West German society since 1945, and the opposing urge to transcend it and get together, which has had all too little opportunity of expressing itself in the conditions of the Federal Republic.

G. is the seventh and least member of a group of friends living in Wiesbaden. His professional character remains uncertain to the last; but the others are an architect (A.), a bank manager (B.), a chemist (C.), a writer (D.), a cor anglais-player (E.), and a television executive (F.). They are bound to each other...