The Story Archive

An Umbrella for This Day

Wilhelm Genazino · 2001 CE · Novel · German · Contemporary

A forty-six-year-old man employed to test luxury shoes drifts through a German city, meeting old acquaintances while his girlfriend leaves him, his income shrinks and he begins to doubt his own sanity. He watches his failures with a comic, almost scientific exactness. A characteristic late novel of Genazino's urban drifter, who received the Georg Büchner Prize in 2004.

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Attributes

Genre
ComedyPsychological
Theme
Isolation & AlienationIdentity & SelfMadnessLove
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
EverymanWanderer
Form
EpisodicUnreliable Narrator
Symbol / motif
The CityThe Wound
Conflict
vs Self
Mode / tone
IronicComic
Culture / tradition
German

Closest analogues