《The Thirteenth Year》作者： - Ruth Nestvold 【EPUB】

zaq

The Thirteenth Year Ruth Nestvold Klaus Professor Dr. Klaus Grabbe was just about to lock his office door when the phone rang. He went back in, put his battered leather briefcase down next to the desk covered with pages of notes for unfinished articles, dog-eared paperback novels by John Barth and Robert Coover, and photocopies of literary criticism by his colleagues Hannelore Fluch and Manfred H�0�2hle, and picked up the phone. "Grabbe." "Hello, Klaus." It was his young wife, Sybille. Her voice was clipped and sharp; she was fed up about something. "Hello, dear." "Have you by any chance caught the news today?" "You know I don't have a radio in my office," he replied mildly. "You might have made the effort to find out what the results were. You did vote, I hope." "On the way here," he lied. Voting had been his excuse to get out of the apartment and away from her on a Sunday, claiming he needed to go by the office afterwards because of paperwork. Instead he had headed straight to the office and gotten so caught up in the stylistic intricacies of post-modernists that he'd lost track of time. "At least that's something," she said, her voice bitter. "It's going to be a lot worse than we thought." "How bad?" he asked obediently. Sybille had a terrible tendency to exaggerate. She didn't belong to the generation that habitually blamed "the Establishment" for everything, but the attitude seemed to inform her thought anyway. "At last count, the DVP had over thirty percent of the vote." Klaus sat down abruptly. The DVP--the Deutsche Volkspartei or German People's Party--was as far to the right as legally possible. "But according to opinion polls, they were at less than twenty."