A review by sharkybookshelf
While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer

3.0

As the Berlin Wall comes down, Daniel and his friends are young teenagers roaming the rough streets of their Leipzig neighbourhood, dreaming of increasingly unrealistic futures for themselves…

Objectively, this book is written incredibly well - the continual violence, drinking, drugs, destruction of property and attempts to pick up and derogatory comments about women build up a rich portrait of these teenagers, the never-ending cycle of violence, the lack of options growing up in their particular neighbourhood and the limits placed on their aspirations. The repetition of it all is the point, of course, and none of it feels gratuitous - it’s all depressingly believable and feels realistic for the characters - but reading it over and over ad nauseam rapidly turned into rather a slog.

To the point where, if it hadn’t been a buddy read, I’d have considered DNFing. Although I couldn’t see how the story would wrap up, it does come together very well with final details of the boys’ individual trajectories poignantly slotting into place. But…at almost 600 pages, it is not a short book and I cannot honestly say that the payoff of the last 75 or so pages is worth the long slog to get there.

The book’s blurb suggests a coming-of-age story as the Berlin Wall comes down, and it was in the end, but not as I expected and more by omission - the Wall is barely mentioned and the GDR’s collapse hardly seems to register with the boys, beyond a change in the football leagues and an amusing encounter with a microwave (also an exodus of teachers, but they’re not particularly fussed by that). It’s a story of those overlooked and left behind by reunification, the flipside of the success story of modern Germany.

I appreciate what Meyer was doing with this raw story of hope and despair and those left behind in the reunification of Germany, and I am glad to have read it, but gosh it was painful to get through.