Weiberroman is a very postmodern, 1990s sort of book. The basic premise is that Gregor Schattschneider has disappeared in mysterious circumstances from the Bavarian island of Frauenchiemsee, leaving behind him the manuscript of his vast and unfinished novel-about-women, Weiberroman, in which he appears as the serially-love-lorn anti-hero. Gregor's friend, the literary scholar Eckhardt (who also appears as a character in the novel), has collated a portion of the thousands of un-ordered manuscript fragments and edited them for publication, and has annotated them with copious quantities of pedantic footnotes, before also disappearing in mysterious circumstances and leaving Politycki to complete the work of preparing the text for publication.

Except that practically all of these "facts" about the genesis of the text are put into question during the course of the book, with Gregor at one point hinting that it is he himself who is writing both text and footnotes, and at another accusing Eckhardt of being the author of the text, and so on. Politycki makes sure that we know we are not allowed to believe in either the stability of the text, or its authority, and that we entirely forget that the whole thing was dreamed up by Politycki! At times it feels like [Kater Murr], [Tristram Shandy] and [Pale fire] all rolled into one, and it definitely has one of the funniest bibliographies I've seen.

The novel itself is in three sections, corresponding to three of the great loves of Gregor's life (we are told that there are further unpublished fragments dealing with at least two more women). The first part, "Kristina", takes place in the early seventies, when Gregor is a teenager in a sleepy small town in Westphalia. "Tania" is set during Gregor's student days in Vienna at the end of the seventies, and "Katharina" in Stuttgart in the late eighties. Gregor appears as something like the stock heterosexual man of romantic comedy, forever falling in love with women, but totally unable to put himself in their place and work out what they might be thinking. Or to explain to them what he himself feels. The women are also, at least at first glance, stock figures: unattainable princess, dumb-blonde Playboy-model, and immaculate flight-attendant. But the narrator helps us to see beyond Gregor's tunnel vision, and we realise that the women are actually much more human and interesting than that. Which is just as well, because Gregor on his own would be a bit of a pain. Fortunately, there's plenty of comedy, both in the narrator's ability to distance himself from and laugh at Gregor-the-protagonist and in the constant sparring between the narrator and the editor, who clearly has no understanding of the concept of fiction, and constantly feels obliged to leap in with a footnote and contradict what Gregor is telling us.

Apart from the ostensible subject of the incomprehensibility of women, there's a lot more going on. One element is Politycki's mock-serious aim of establishing the cultural heritage of the "Generation of 78" — which is of course really just a way to poke fun at the self-importance of all the people who have made careers out of their activities as student rebels in 68. There are hundreds of references to contemporary events in the text (as Eckhardt can't resist pointing out, almost all of them incorrect), from Baader-Meinhoff to the fall of the Berlin wall, but the running joke is that despite being an intellectual and the protagonist of a Bildungsroman, Gregor isn't in the least interested in politics (or indeed in anything much else, apart from women, word-games, and beer). As we are reminded in the first part, he belongs to the generation that all wore parkas, blue-jeans and air-force boots to express their contempt for uniforms.

This is a very unGerman book in many ways: it's poking fun at seriousness of all kinds, culture, history, the academic establishment, Swabians, expensive cars, and above all at Schwärmerei. But it does have one very German attribute, which is sort of endearing (and which the author is aware of: he has Eckhardt mention it in his editorial postscript). It is one of the most over-engineered comic novels I've ever read. I think I might have been put off by this in the early chapters if I hadn't been drawn in by the nostalgic appeal of his description of German provincial life in the seventies, as seen by teenagers. Being of a similar age and having spent a lot of holidays with my teenage German cousins, it's all extremely recognisable! ( )