Wilhelm Genazino's The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt was a thoroughly enjoyable read. The central character who is telling us his story teeters on the edge of insanity for most of the book while continually conveying his own absurdity in charmingly witty and amusing self analyses. There are definite echoes of the comic aspects of Kafka here and the stories of the contemporary Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad also come to mind with his protagonists who similarly obsess debilitatingly over countless existential life issues.The writing is quite dense at times with paragraph lengths of over two pages but that shouldn't deter a prospective reader. Many are the literary delights to be had with this book.
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