I really like Hans Fallada’s writing and will forever be grateful to the publicists at Scribe who sent me three of his titles at a time when I’d never heard of him. I’ve now read five of his novels: Alone in Berlin, Little Man What Now? The Drinker, Wolf Among Wolves and Nightmare in Berlin and have two titles on my TBR: Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch? (a Penguin Moderns edition) and A Small Circus. So of course I swooped on Tales from the Underground as soon as I saw it at the library.

What I like about Fallada’s writing is the way he manages to capture the sepia tones of life in Germany between the wars and during WW2, and how he tells the stories of flawed ordinary people who somehow manage to be engaging characters all the same. He was not living that life in sepia, of course, he was living it as dreary realism, as the introduction to this collection of short stories explains. What Jenny Williams does really well in this introduction is to show how these mostly autobiographical stories mesh with events in Fallada’s turbulent life: periods of unemployment; working as a labourer for the landed gentry, his addictions to alcohol and morphine, marriage and fatherhood and his imprisonment for embezzlement. She also shows how some of these stories reappear in his novels, so it’s an introduction well worth reading.

It sounds grim, but there is a jauntiness about some of the stories, and a refusal to give in. I particularly liked the stories about struggles with married life and fatherhood… in ‘Happiness and Woe’ (1932) he depicts the simple games of father and son, and the father’s anxiety about having to leave a small child at home alone. It couldn’t be helped: his wife was at work and he had to go into town to collect his unemployment relief payment so that the rent could be paid. But then there is his terrible failure when his sense of relief takes him to drinking at the bar afterwards…

‘Fifty Marks and A Merry Christmas’ (1932) is about a young couple living close to the breadline and their dreams of spending a Christmas bonus from his work. At the moment The Guardian is running a series about poverty in Australia and Fallada’s story with its Christmas wishlist shows the same melancholy detail. Finding the money for simple things such as a haircut is a struggle, and the purchase of a lottery ticket is not the folly it appears to be but rather a desperate clutch at hope for better things.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/09/21/tales-from-the-underworld-by-hans-fallada-tr... ( )