Rain

Features a blackly humorous plot about organised crime and writer's block the literary equivalent of Delicatessen.

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'The house groaned. Usually it groaned once between three and four in the morning, and sometimes again at around four thirty. The sound woke Leon and Martina up on their first few nights. Then they integrated it into their dreams, which from now on were full of creaking bridges and falling trees. There was also the new wallpaper. It did not stay stuck on well everywhere. Water oozed from the wall in various places, dissolving the paste or leaving tidemarks like unsightly patches of sweat. Water dripped down the insides of the window frames. "It will get better when it stops raining," said Leon.' When Leon Ulbricht lands a contract to write a gangster's memoirs and moves into his dream home in an East German village with his beautiful wife Martina, everything seems set for an idyllic existence. But the dream home turns out to be in the middle of a fetid swamp; his house and his marriage are falling apart; he can't write the book he needs to write and has spent all his advance. It rains without end and their attempts to repair the house, or at least dry it out, are hampered by the plague of slugs eating away at the garden and the foundations.And then the gangster, wondering why his memoirs are not yet completed, decides to get nasty