Book excerpt: From a writer whose work is considered "among the most significant prose and poetry written not just in the GDR but in all of postwar Germany" (Joshua Cohen), a digressive masterwork in the tradition of Heinrich Böll, Imre Kértesz, and Dasa Drndić that interrogates lust, God, statelessness, addiction, capitalism, and above all else the writer's place in "a century of lies."