A novel from the life of the East German provinceIngo Schulze wrote a book about modernity, peering into the “common man”, into the “trifles” of life, in those times when the dust of the Berlin Wall rose and settled. “Simple stories” is a collection of stories that form a kind of novel about the provincial Germans of a disappeared country. Just as Claude Monet recreated a sunrise with small strokes of pure tone, hoping for the optical effect of vision, so Ingo Schulze, story after story, creates a picture describing the intertwined destinies of different people in the eastern town of Altenburg after the unification of Germany.