Landscape In Concrete (Open Letter Modern Classics) - Softcover

"It is this Book that Confirms Lind's Stature as an Author of International Importance."

"Jakov was a bad boy. . . . He was a coyote, a trickster. He enjoyed hash and LSD. A wicked smile played around his mouth, while witty aphorisms and deep insights tripped off his lips. He emanated inner strength--and an electric intelligence that we all wanted to emulate." -- Anthony Rudolf

"One of the most idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century."

"Landscape in Concrete is essentially a terrifying attempt to test possible clues which will guide man through the contemporary maze."

"Sometimes war is all one knows. "Landscape in Concrete" is a novel following one Gauthier Bachmann, an ideal soldier under the Nazi regime. When he is discharged for mental health reasons, he refuses his diagnosis and will do anything to return to the front lines. He quickly becomes and pawn in many Nazi official's actions, in the dark happenings behind the war. "Landscape in Concrete" is a fine novel of world fiction, expertly translated from the original German by Ralph Manheim."-John Burroughs, The Midwest Book Review

"Sometimes war is all one knows. Landscape in Concrete is a novel following one Gauthier Bachmann, an ideal soldier under the Nazi regime. When he is discharged for mental health reasons, he refuses his diagnosis and will do anything to return to the front lines. He quickly becomes and pawn in many Nazi official's actions, in the dark happenings behind the war. Landscape in Concrete is a fine novel of world fiction, expertly translated from the original German by Ralph Manheim."-John Burroughs, The Midwest Book Review

"Jakov was a bad boy. . . . He was a coyote, a trickster. He enjoyed hash and LSD. A wicked smile played around his mouth, while witty aphorisms and deep insights tripped off his lips. He emanated inner strength--and an electric intelligence that we all wanted to emulate."--Anthony Rudolf

Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front.
While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the war's underbelly - deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators - who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they've justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.