The Drinker

During the twilight of the Nazi regime, while locked up in a criminal asylum on charges of attempting to murder his wife, Hans Fallada wrote The Drinker in meticulously crisscrossed script—the better to conserve what materials he could get—in an astonishing 14 days. The intensity of his effort carries over directly to the telling of his tale as Fallada's prose pulses with the authenticity of lived experience. After a petty argument with his long-suffering wife, disaster-in-the-making and doomed narrator Erwin Sommer doesn't begin a steady decline into alcoholism so much as hurl himself into it in a suicidal swan dive. As his degradation accelerates, his paranoia, arrogance, and denial rise up in a compensatory flare, rivaling the most cringe-inducing behavior of any Dostoevsky character, and blinding Sommer to his own destruction. The psychological insights that Fallada (who was not sympathetic to the Nazi cause) brings to bear on Sommer are all the more impressive for their pitiless acuity, suggesting that Fallada was watching his own collapse from a helpless position. Once Sommer is locked up and forced to reckon with his actions, the tone of the book sobers up as well and the final phase of his unrelenting descent to the absolute bottom begins. Despite its grim trajectory, The Drinker none the less makes for an uncomfortably riveting reading experience.