Books: Wrestling with the Angel

SPECULATIONS ABOUT JAKOB (240 pp.)—Uwe Johnson—Grove ($4.50).

There is often high art in knowing when to say nothing at all. and Uwe Johnson has mastered it. One of a handful of young German writers (TIME, Jan. 4) who are just now working the literary equivalent of Germany's economic miracle, Johnson, 29, has produced a provocative novel full of cryptic clues and calculated silences, inviting the reader to fill in the blank spaces with his own imagination. The result is a remarkably intimate look at life in East Germany, a finely shaded inquiry into the small tensions of a divided world.

The Jakob of...