This novel follows a German Jewish business man in the days following Kristallnacht. It's an exploration of the psychological state of a desperate person, embodied in his endless and increasingly random train journeys and the encounters he has with various people. It seems disjointed, and there is not much attempt to develop characters.
I appreciated it as a firsthand attempt to convey the hopelessness of Jewish Germans at this time, but as literature it felt quite clumsy. This may be because it was a translation, which inevitably loses something. But as a testimony it stands witness to the thinness of the veneer of civilisation, which has echoes today.