Josef Georg Gallistl [the protagonist of Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit] will doubtless attain a certain fame as the literary representation of the runner doomed to bring up the tail in the West German rat-race. His account of his "disease" is a triumph for Martin Walser's gifts as a humorist: a very amusing, rather sad book about the competitiveness that has run wild in West German society since 1945, and the opposing urge to transcend it and get together, which has had all too little opportunity of expressing itself in the conditions of the Federal Republic.

G. is the seventh and least member of a group of friends living in Wiesbaden. His professional character remains uncertain to the last; but the others are an architect (A.), a bank manager (B.), a chemist (C.), a writer (D.), a cor anglais-player (E.), and a television executive (F.). They are bound to each other by sturdy mutual dislike, and by the need of each to assure himself of his social identity. Their pecking order follows the alphabet, so that G. is full of envy and hatred of the others, as impotent to impress or please them as he is to hold down a job, or get his writing published in the world at large.

Weighed down by the completeness of his failure, G. begins to withdraw, and in doing so observes that a baulked craving for success bedevils the lives of A., B., C., D., E. and F. no less than his own. "Gallistl's disease", he finds, is endemic. For a while he refuses to have any further truck with society, shuts himself up in his room, and, like Kafka's salesman-insect, is fed by benevolent relatives and friends who place portions of food for him on the windowsill.

Up to this point Die Gallistl'sche Krankheit has a personally felt, immediate quality. The final section, which describes the disease's cure, is perhaps inevitably less compelling….

It is doubtful whether G. is really converted to communism. In fact we are left with the impression that Gallistl turns to the communists primarily because they are there, because he likes them, and because he has had to break with his other friends in any case. Martin Walser has painted his portrait with a pragmatic honesty that allows both his humour and his humanity to flourish.