This is a short, sharp little book, often taught in schools in Germany, but which I read in Jamie Bulloch’s English translation.

I read it in a couple of days, though I think it would have been better approached in a single sitting. It’s a single, breathless, unbroken monologue delivered by the daughter of a family, whose mother is preparing a mussel dinner to welcome home their father. It’s a claustrophobic and propulsive read. I just wanted to keep going, partly to escape the suffocating domestic atmosphere and partly to find out where on earth it’s all heading. It’s a quietly brilliant piece of narrative control.

Originally published in 1990, the novella has often been described as a veiled allegory of political tyranny, with the father figure as a stand-in for the East German state, or authoritarianism more broadly. But for me, with a less-than-perfect grasp of German history and reading it in the present cultural moment, I was struck more by how contemporary it feels as a portrait of toxic masculinity within a domestic setting. Less regime, more patriarchy.

The father dominates the entire book through sheer force of absence. And yet it’s the daughter’s voice, childlike and unreliable, that gives the story its emotional weight. There’s a touch of humour throughout, with little turns of phrase, slightly skewed logic, a child’s earnest interpretation of adult dynamics. It lightens what is, in essence, quite a dark and disturbing tale — yet that levity makes the darkness more acute. Is this all as grim as it seems, or is it the impression of a child with a flair for drama?

I felt a good deal of sympathy for the narrator. Her unreliability made her more relatable. I wanted to protect her, seeing what she can’t. That dynamic gives the novella an oddly tender quality, even as the plot edges ever closer to its strangely satisfying conclusion.

It’s not a book I expect to return to, but I’m glad I read it. I’d recommend it as a short palate cleanser, something to read in an afternoon that will stick in the mind longer than you expect. A neat little curiosity, with much more going on under the surface than first appears.