Prompted by my trip to Berlin, I found this elegant story about a young woman surviving in a tumultuous Berlin, where she flees after stealing a fur coat. Berlin to her is the promise of stardom, but the city she finds has a thin veneer of glamour, as does the stolen fur that covers her hungry stomach, her yearning for meaning and love.

The book was written and set in 1931-2, the last year before the Nazis rise to power. This gives it more significance now than was intended by Keun. Weimar is collapsing, the men surrounding Doris have less money to care for her, feed her. Doris is oblivious to the political factors, though they shape her life, and we are left to glimpse them in the periphery.

Yet she is not oblivious to everything. She is extremely perceptive, can often explain people and their motives better than they could themselves. She is also aware that her ability to exchange herself for male attention and money has an expiry date, that she is a waning commodity in these times.

Her lack of education is, she feels, limiting, though she describes the shallow facade of the literate, and her own use of the occasional foreign word to create the same fleeting superiority.

Just as the educated can starve in these years of hardship and political violence, the romantic can live a lonely life in Berlin. Appearance, shiny lights, are all false. Like the blind man to whom Doris narrates her days, nobody can quite see the truth, or what they will collectively do next, for bread and grandeur.