First published in 1959, Illusions is about four office workers in an unnamed West German city. The building’s window cleaner introduces the cast: Frau Schramm, the ‘eldest and most senior member’; typist Fräulein Viol, a woman of ‘indeterminate’ age whose hair colour is as changeable as her persona; translator Paul Westermann, a ‘failed academic’; and trainee Therese, a nineteen-year-old for whom everyone falls, ‘from her boss down to her five-year-old nephew’.

Over the course of one weekend, their various illusions are shattered in chapters told from each character’s perspective in turn. We learn about Schramm’s past doing ‘everything in her power to aid the Reich’, Viol’s history of ‘importunate lovers’, Westermann’s dream of leaving his wife and child to go on an adventure and Therese’s wish that she could split herself ‘like an earthworm and go in two directions at once’. 

The new English translation by Rob Madole flows in long sentences full of surprising imagery: ‘Above the twenty-third floor the building is cut off smoothly like a loaf of bread, offering an armoured slice to the sky, which drags the bellies of its clouds over the surface and wastes its