Runaway Horse

»Helmut and Sabrina Halm have always managed vacations of lazy privacy in their favourite retreat on Germany’s Lake Constance. So when the energetic, handsome Klaus Buch turns up with his beautiful wife Hella, Helmut is quite ready to dismiss this dimly familiar acquaintance. But Klaus is overjoyed to recognise his old schoolmate Helmut, eager to recall every incident of their shared childhood, and to display every detail of his successful lifestyle as a thoroughly emancipated, thoroughly fit, author and environmental expert. The precious days of privacy give way to an unwanted and awkward intimacy, as the Buchs and Halms hike, dine and sail together. Their joint activities aggravate myriad psychological tensions among the four characters, which are all the more intensely ironic for their peaceful veneer, and which must eventually erupt. […] Runaway Horse is an extraordinary novella, that comprises at once the concision and wit of s short story and the grace, narrative intrigue and psychological complexity of a longer novel.«

(Book description from the English edition by Secker & Warburg)

»Runaway Horse is an extraordinary novel which sprang to the best-seller lists as soon as it came out in Germany and was hailed by critics. […] Set in a resort on the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance, Runaway Horse tells the story of two men, once schoolmates, whose accidental reunion begins in an exchange of memories but, in the space of a few vacation days, grows into a monstrous intimacy. One, athletic and gregarious, is bent on a meaningful relationship. The other, a skeptic and a professor of philosophy, prefers his privacy. The most ordinary daily occurrences, a walk, a drink – or even an encounter with a runaway horse – heighten their differences. Finally the tensions of memory and unspoken competition destroy all pretense of civility when a sudden violent storm prompts an act of liberation which is as terrible as it is exhilarating. Yet just as every image in this masterfully controlled novel finds an echo, every act has its consequences, and Martin Walser deftly and humorously follows them through each character’s troubled psyche.«

(Book description from the English edition by Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

»A brilliant work of German prose of our time« Marcel Reich-Ranicki, FAZ

»Runaway Horse will be praised with the word masterpiece« Die ZEIT

»This story will be one of those that will survive our century.« Stuttgarter Zeitung