Description
Near Fine dust jacket, a mylar dust jacket has been added, with illustration of an empty room on front, white lettering, green and black lettering on the spine, author photo on back panel. The Near Fine condition binding is green paper over boards, tan cloth-backed, black lettering on spine. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.3″ tall x 5.7″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
The author of the widely acclaimed novel Jacob the Liar here tells the singularly moving story of a man pitted against state and fate. A schoolteacher in the East German Democratic Republic thinks he has had a heart attack. This jolts him into a heightened awareness of his public and private life, with the result that his fears generate courage. His conscience as a teacher has long been uneasy: he knows himself to be a tool of state propaganda, used to mold the minds of his trusting pupils to acceptance of an oppressive, deceitful society. Simultaneously he recognizes the failure of his marriage, which has become a routine relationship drained of vitality. As he tries to resolve these conflicts in order to become a human being acceptable to himself, the pressures of convention, in his case reinforced by a system completely intolerant of “deviation,” bear down on him. The solution he finds is of deep irony, given that the society he has to adjust to claims to be a “workers’ republic.’ The novel, however, is by no means a political tract. It is a story of crisis that is part of the universal human experience, only sharpened here by the extremity of circumstance.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
Born in Poland in 1937, Jurek Becker spent most of his early years in the Lodz ghetto and in concentration camps. Subsequently he became a resident of East Berlin, where he wrote for film, television, and cabaret. Jacob the Liar, the novel that made him internationally known, was originally written as a screenplay. The film was produced after the novel’s publication and submitted as the East German entry to the 25th Berlin Film Festival in West Berlin, where it won the coveted Silber Bär Award. When Becker submitted Sleepless Days to his publisher in East Germany, he was asked by the censors to make substantial changes. Unable to acquiesce without destroying the very core of his argument, he moved-as he says, temporarily-to the West and published his book there. In 1978. he was guest lecturer and resident writer at Oberlin College in Ohio.
