The metaphor sustaining [Anniversaries] is the dossier or data-bank. The reader is given an excess of data, from which he must learn to select; and sometimes the novel (showing that it is alive after all) will positively buttonhole him upon the irrelevant. With this goes an 'affectless' tone; the novel may start numbering its statements….

[The novel, further, has a] fondness for the 'finding-out-about-someone' plot (to which, of course, the dossier-like form is appropriate). Someone is trying, across the years or the political frontiers, and from questionable, or perhaps deliberately falsified, data, to reconstruct another person's life and deeds; or perhaps several different people are doing it for different motives; or someone is doing it for some third person's benefit….

Two stories emerge and are pursued in parallel—the story of what led up to, and the story of what followed, the events in Uwe Johnson's first novel...