SOURCE: Schwarz, Robert. Review of Die Taube, by Patrick Süskind. World Literature Today 61, no. 4 (autumn 1987): 620.

In the following review, Schwarz praises Süskind's “wonderful” and “profound” achievement in Die Taube.

[In Die Taube,] Jonathan Noel, a fifty-year-old recluse, likes the uneventful life, the low profile, the security born of an unchanging daily routine. He abominates “making waves” and feels threatened by the slightest alteration of a self-imposed, dull protocol. Ever since certain youthful disasters sapped his personality juices, he had decided on stability and unswerving loyalty to a monotonous, solitary, diffident existence as his personal summum bonum. Jonathan carries this to such a pitch that, when one day a stray pigeon sits before his door, his whole life comes unhinged. The pigeon becomes a major crisis. To cope with it, he even moves to a hotel. Ironically, he works as a security guard for a Parisian bank...