Point of View

Point of View

The two stories in this collection are both narrated from the first person point of view of a young British expatriate, an aspiring novelist, living in Berlin and collecting experiences of life in the same way as some people collect photographs and put them in an album. Indeed, at the beginning of "Goodbye to Berlin," the narrator/author describes himself in exactly those terms - "I am a camera," he writes. Also in both stories, there is the very clear sense that the young narrator doesn't have a great deal of experience of his own. There are few (if any) exclamations of surprise at the events and/or characters he describes, but there is a certain sense of genteel disbelief about the narration, and about how he gets involved with the individuals and incidents he's describing. The key component of this book's point...