If you're a German writer born in the twenty years before 1945, then sooner or later you have to write your big autobiographical coming-of-age novel. In Walser’s case it was definitely “later”: this appeared in 1998, forty years after most of his contemporaries had published their “my childhood in the Third Reich” novels and collected their prizes.

So, we would expect Ein Springender Brunnen to be a bit different, even without knowing anything about Walser. It looks at first sight like a straightforward autobiographical novel, with a central character whose situation matches what we know of Walser’s own: born in 1927 in the picturesque village of Wasserburg on Lake Constance, where his mother kept the station inn. After so many years, evidently Walser doesn't have to worry too much about disguising people and places. But it gets odder when we work out that it's a book written with half a century of hindsight by someone who despises hindsight, is notoriously cynical about German historical remorse (which he sees as essentially self-serving), and who believes that memory can’t be trusted and that the past is a fundamentally inaccessible place.

Walser tries to present us with the world as it might have been seen from the perspective of young Johann, his viewpoint character. The great political events intrude only to the extent that they interfere with the lives of the real people in the village. Johann is much more interested in words (and later on, in sex) than he is in history or politics. He is repelled by the coarse, aggressive way the Nazis treat language and by a couple of incidents of violence he witnesses, but beyond that they don't impinge very strongly on his consciousness. He is so wrapped up in himself that he simply doesn't notice a lot of the things that were going on in the village, and has to be told about them after the war by a former schoolfriend.

Although it is quite a self-centred book, in which Johann is really the only fully-developed character, Walser does have a lot of fun creating the many eccentric minor characters who wander in and out on the fringes of the story, each with their own special set of words and way of talking set at some precisely-defined point between standard German and Swabian or Bavarian dialect. In fact, Walser is so proud of some of the obscure dialect words he has revived for this book that he can't resist putting in an afterword to explain just how important he finds “ring” (adj.), “losen”, “gelampt”, and “Mase”, and how these words have no precise 1:1 counterpart in High German.

Sometimes this feels like a very slow book: it takes the five-year-old Johann about a hundred pages to walk home from the barber’s shop, for instance - but it's a very enjoyable reading experience. The rural colour is fun, there's a pleasant feeling of nostalgia, and at the same time it's easy to identify with young Johann’s concerns and to come to the conclusion that if we’d been around at the time we might ourselves have been much more preoccupied with the business of growing up than with attempting to save western civilisation from Hitler. ( )