Fallada details a horrible fall from middle class (?) comfort in a story with not as much drinking as you might expect.

Our narrator here is a, very sober business man who, finding himself drawn into a petty quarrel with his wife, decides to experiment with alcohol to numb his frustration. This leads to a quietly dramatic spiral of events, leading to incarceration and misery.

Extremely convincing character portraits are dotted all over The Drinker, many of them ready to take advantage of a newly alcholic failure, portrayed as out of his depth throughout a large part of the book. This seems to be the moral for me here: the Sommer's character is his weakness, his cowardice and inability to communicate-his drinking only makes it worse.

The consequences rather than the act of drinking are the focus of the tragedy. By today's standards, most of Erwin's actions are offensive, but mild by the standards of any national newspaper. His downfall is nonetheless punished by institutionalisation. Much of this is spent sober, and is recounted with an air of reportage. The story is generally one of defeat, and then bleak acceptance.


For any readers of this review, QUESTION:

Many of the German character names in The Drinker seem almost Dickensian to me, Duftermann as the boorish, whiny fat man the narrator has to share a cell with,Lobedanz as the lank, unwholesome landlord/conman, and so on. Do the literal translations of these names lend any truth to this theory or am I hearing the sounds from a mono-lingual English man's point of view?