-- Philip Levine

*A Sad Affair

A Novel

Wolfgang Koeppen

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

W.W. Norton: 178 pp., $23.95

Like an acrobat poised on a tightrope, or better yet a slack-rope, lurching wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous, German writer Wolfgang Koeppen's amazing first novel, "A Sad Affair," written in 1934, tells the story of one man's obsessive love for an emotionally elusive femme fatale.

The lover is an intensely romantic young student named Friedrich; the object of his devotion, a delicate-looking aspiring actress named Sibylle. Their romance unfolds against the backdrop of pre-World War II Europe, with its cabarets, refugees and looming societal unrest. But in Friedrich's Sibylle-centric mind, the ominous political atmosphere fades to insignificance beside the blazing colors of his grand passion.

Koeppen's seriocomic paean to romantic love was viewed by the Nazis as yet another specimen of decadent art and banned in 1936. In the 1950s, Koeppen trained his sights on the larger picture of politics and society with three powerfully satiric novels about postwar Germany, including the matter of former Nazis finding their way into the government. In a life that spanned almost the entire 20th century, Koeppen, who was born in 1906 and died 90 years later, wrote only five novels. But, as translator Michael Hofmann tells us in his sparkling introduction to "A Sad Affair," when this mercurial and exasperating author did sit down to write, "the results were unexpected and worth having." Many writers have sung the joys and sorrows of love, the ecstatic agonies of romantic obsession, but few have done so with the sheer ebullience that animates every page of "A Sad Affair."

-- Merle Rubin

*San Remo Drive

A Novel From Memory

Leslie Epstein

Handsel Books: 244 pp., $24

Leslie Epstein is an accomplished and prolific writer, perhaps best known for his tragicomic Holocaust novel, "King of the Jews." But the key to understanding and appreciating his latest book is that he is the son of Philip G. Epstein and the nephew of Julius J. Epstein, the Oscar-winning screenwriters of such Hollywood classics as "Casablanca" and "Arsenic and Old Lace." Epstein's family can be discerned just beneath the surface of "San Remo Drive," a haunting and ultimately heartbreaking account of what it was like to grow up in the movie colony of Southern California in the 1940s and '50s.