Lovers want to know the truth, but they do not always want to tell it. For some East Germans, the fall of Communism was like the end of a long and painful love affair: free to tell the truth at last, they found they no longer wanted to hear it. This book relates the history of central Europe from the perspective of those on the other side of the Cold War. Historian and novelist Ali (Redemption, 1991, etc.) charts the lives of a family of activists from the days of the Russian Revolution to the post-Wall malaise of our times. Ali is one of those rare creatures, an academic historian who has made a fairly successful transition to writing serious novels. His earlier fictions playfulness belied the writers training and roots, but this latest comes as a reminder of his Oxford/New Left Review background. The protagonist and sometime narrator is Vladimir, a former East German dissident who now finds himself as dismayed by the Germany that followed unification as he was by the half-Germany in which he lived and worked before. Vlady, as hes often called, has been fired from his teaching post because he still believes in a democratic form of socialism, ironically the same ideal that brought him problems in the DDR. His son Karl is a rising apparatchik in the post-ideological Social Democrats, his wife has left him for reasons that will be revealed only toward novels end, and his old friends are dying or changing sides in a discomfiting manner. Vladys main response is to try to decipher the mysteries of his recently deceased mother's past: Was his father a truly heroic figure of the old Communist movement, or something more sinister? What hell find, of course, is not what he expected. Ali tells this story in a pervasively melancholy tone leavened by occasional witty details such as a Sotheby's auction whose centerpiece is a 17th-century silk condom reputed to have belonged to Louis XIV. But hes too much of a historian to make the people here come to life as characters. Rather, they represent a series of political positions arbitrarily assigned quotas of tics that pass for psychology. Can a thoughtful and well-written novel also be a failure, and a bit of a bore? Heres the answer. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Born and educated in Pakistan and later at Oxford University, Tariq Ali is a writer, playwright and film-maker. He is an editor of the New Left Review and the author of over a dozen books on world history and politics; his first novel, Redemption, was published in 1990. It was followed in 1992 by Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which has been translated into several languages and was awarded the Best Foreign Language Fiction Prize in Santiago de Compolesta, Spain, in 1995. Tariq Ali lives in London.