How do we become – or not become – the people that we have become? This is the fundamental question addressed in Christoph Hein’s novel, a novel that consistently views things from the perspective of painter Paula Trousseau.

Sometimes availing herself of dynamic situational descriptions, sometimes employing a kind of fast-forward technique, Hein recounts the adventures of the self-assertion of a woman whose outlook and experiences cast a spell over the reader, who is then torn between sympathy and rejection.

When, in the novel's first pages, readers first hear about the painter, they are immediately told that she committed suicide in France in the year 2000. And they are able to follow her version of things from her diary entries: her view of the world, of art, of the relationship between the sexes and her experiences with men and women. How, against the will of her parents and her husband, she decides to study art – at the price of hardening her heart against everybody and everything. All her relationships with men are doomed to failure, those with women tend to be more constant but cannot prevent gray tones from dominating her pictures. Where does this indifference to other people and, in the final analysis, to herself, actually come from? Is her background responsible for this, or is it the political circumstances, the hierarchy of the sexes, the cultural situation? How do we become what we are?

Portrait of a Son With Father