The Sea in the Radio

Jurgen Beckers The Sea in the Radio is a collection of journal sentences divided into three sections called notebooks. In this great concert of a novel, language has been pared down to a minimum: fragments, phrases, and short sentences combine and make up a life both banal and profound. It is a life in which many of the details remain unstated or, as in miniatures, float just beyond the edges of the frame. Though at first the narrative may seem to move in a relatively harmless manner, soon enough we begin to realize that the story to be told may indeed be more unsettling than we had suspected. The Sea in the Radio is a novel that bears witness not only to ones final years but also to ones place within history in general and Germanys cataclysmic twentieth-century past in particular.