Weesner, Theodore

New York. 1976. January 1977. Random House. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0394484339. 175 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. keywords: Literature America . FROM THE PUBLISHER - Occupied Germany: For thousands of young American soldiers a lonely, even terrifying, experience, a foreign land of ruins, black markets and veiled glances. But something else as well. As Billy Kohl travels south he sees the fast trains, too, and the Mercedes taxis. And the women. ‘An excess of women,' an NCO has warned. The train rolls and Billy's imagination soars. Sex seems to be everywhere upon the German landscape; certainly its force is coming alive within Billy Kohl. A central passion of adolescence is becoming a reality. Still, if sex is a primary passion, other, underlying passions are usually waiting to emerge, and in this bittersweet story of haunting power and eroticism, Theodore Weesner draws the subtle and evocative lines between longing and liberation, self-awareness and self-esteem, sexuality and the universal desire to leave one's mark upon the world, to create. It is 1952 when Billy Kohl, eighteen, his background one of shabby jobs and emptiness, of having ‘touched bottom,' enters Germany, a country which seems always to have been a paradox, a land of perplexing mystery and perilous romanticism. Here he meets Ursula, a woman more than twice his age, who unexpectedly, through kindness, a desperate longing of her own, perhaps a need to survive and to counter her own losses in the war, responds to his tentative advances. Billy Kohl's awakening is sexual, but it is also intellectual and emotional, even artistic. He is seen to achieve an initial self-acceptance, but also a first opening of the ‘heart's eye,' for A German Affair is, finally, a story of the emergence of human spirit. With spare, simple sentences that build an astonishing emotional impact, Weesner traces this development, taking the adolescent's world he evoked so powerfully in The Car Thief and creating a story of strange, compelling beauty. inventory #24949 ISBN: 0394484339.