Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989.
Uwe Tellkamp was born in 1968 in Dresden. After completing his military service, he lost his place to study medicine on the grounds of 'political unreliability'. He was arrested in 1989 but went on to study medicine in Liepzig, Dresden and New York, later becoming a surgeon. He has won numerous regional prizes for poetry, as well as the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for The Sleep in the Clocks. In 2008, he won the German Book Prize for The Tower.
Tellkamp depicts the grotesque idiosyncrasies of the GDR's
bureaucracy. He speaks with the slowness and sobriety that comes
with growing up in a system where the wrong word at the wrong time
can set one's existence ablaze...he displays masterfully the
intellectual shackles and the sheer suffocation the younger
generation of intellectuals must have felt in the twilight of the
GDR
*Standpoint*
Memories and impressions grow wild across the lattice of the plot,
bringing the symphonic book to - but never over - the brink of
cacophony
*The Times Literary Supplement*
The awfulness of life under the socialist regime is brilliantly
done
*Sunday Times Culture*
A lush tapestry of characters, composed of a thousand scenes and
situations, and punctuated by poetic digressions, The Tower brings
a German ghost to life . . . The Tower stands as a monument against
forgetting
*Le Monde*
In Mike Mitchell's English, Tellkamp's prose is polished, vivid and
observationally acute
*Telegraph*
Set in the ivory tower inhabited by the educated Dresden
bourgeoisie, Uwe Tellkamp's The Tower paints a grandiose panorama
of the demise of the GDR
*Die Welt*
So blunt, so radical, so void of illusion - life in the GDR has
never before been portrayed in such a meticulous way . . . The
struggle for materials, the camp mentality, and the ubiquitous
mistrust: the GDR rises again in all of its now-almost-forgotten
guises
*Die Zeit*
There's no way to recommend The Tower enough
*The Gryphon*
Chosen by Boyd Tonkin
*Independent – Best Fiction in Translation*
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