The young man

The writings of Botho Strauss examine the tension between the individual and society in the anonymity of the contemporary world. A theater director, playwright, and writer, Strauss broke with Berlin's leftist intellectual milieu in the late 1970s and turned to more personal topics; the result, and his response, inform The Young Man, a provocative work by a controversial German thinker.

The young man of the title, Leon Pracht, has left the theater to write. Contemplative, brooding, alienated from both society in general and those to whom he should be closest, Pracht moves numbly through a series of encounters, the precision of his observation of both the everyday and the fantastic underscored by his increasing detachment. His reflections, meditations, and reactions build a compelling portrait of contemporary society and of the individual struggling to find a place both within and without it.