ANYONE WHO knows Obelisk, Peter Pastan's outstanding fixed-price Italian restaurant on P Street NW, is likely to have high expectations of Pastan's new Pizzeria Paradiso. It's just opened, next door to Obelisk at 2029 P St., and features pizzas baked in a wood-burning oven,...

Ethiopia and indeed Africa is due to reclaim one of its stolen archaeological treasures, when Italy finally returns the Axum obelisk, looted from Ethiopia by Italian invasion forces in 1937. No date has yet been fixed for the return, but the Ethiopians hope "it...

A central "school" in modern fiction has been made up of writers who have considered themselves the outlaws and outcasts of modern society…. In the Forties and Fifties the tone of this literature had shifted from the tragic to the satirical: the comedy or farce of social desperation. Erich Remarque's ["The Black Obelisk"] fits perfectly into this new category. The scene is the post-World-War-I Germany of economic inflation….

[The Black Obelisk] is set in a small city in Germany in 1923, when the effects of the First World War are still cruelly felt and the signs of the war to come are growing clear. Ludwig Bodmer, twenty-five years old and a war veteran, has taken up life again in his native city and is scraping a living as the advertising manager of a tombstone firm…. Bodmer, who tells his own story in the present tense, is a man of singularly attractive personality. His view of life is tough, romantic, sympathetic, and...