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Book review

‘Allegro Pastel’: An intensely specific Berlin love story

Leif Randt's uncanny romance novel 'Allegro Pastel' puts Berlin under a blindingly specific microscope, reproducing the hypervisbility of modern living.

Photo: IMAGO / Emmanuele Contini

There’s something about reading Allegro Pastel that evokes the aisles of Decathlon; the sportswear washed in fluorescent light, simultaneously hyper-illuminating and dulling, dazzling and matte. And not just because Leif Randt reportedly initially planned to title the book “Artengo”, after Decathlon’s line of tennis gear.

The novel is a love story, in a detached Sally Rooney kind of way, between Tanja, a Berlin-based novelist trying to follow up a breakout hit, and Jerome, a successful web designer living in his childhood home in the Frankfurt suburbs. Randt captures with precision not just the material details of modern German life, but how it feels to live it.

Every place in the novel is real (they party at Panorama Bar, eat Chinese at Da Jia Le, watch Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot at Delphi LUX). Their relationship blossoms over Telegram, Snapchat, iMessage. Randt has been compared to the hyperrealist pop of Bret Easton Ellis, Rainald Goetz or Christian Kracht.

But whereas those writers fixated on the minutiae in order to skewer it, Randt’s brilliance is in producing an uncanny reproduction of contemporary life (at least for my generation) under the numbing bright light of his prose and the excessive self-analysis of his characters.

  • Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt (trans. by Peter Kuras) is available now from Granta, details.