Author of The foreign friend, a story translated into more than 15 languages since its publication in 1983, the German Christoph Hein, born in 1944, is also a playwright, novelist and essayist. After having published around ten of his books in French, Métailié editions are publishing Dismaythe writer’s most recent novel, published in Berlin in 2018. The title is an allusion to Dismay of student Törless, the homoerotic novel by Robert Musil, published in 1906, which will fall into the hands of Friedward, a young homosexual born in 1933 who suffers from his father’s repressive Catholic morality. Without pathos, without complacency and without Manichaeism, the novel takes us with remarkable precision into the very homophobic GDR (1949-1990). Despite the impeccable social facade he has created for himself, his sham marriage to Jacqueline, Friedward is torn apart by lies and dissimulation, crushed by the repression of his deep identity. By skillfully intertwining the intimate and the political, by conveying constant oppression, perpetual risk, and almost inevitable betrayal, the work captivates the reader from start to finish.
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