Kleinzeit is a middle-aged London bourgeois. He's a successful copywriter with a wife and two kids, and he generally has his life together. The book opens with everything going to shit. Fired from his job, acute pain in his hypotenuse, a hospital ward, and amnesia. Hospital talks to him. So do his hospital bed, God, his fellow patients, and the doctors—pretty much everyone except Memory. Kleinzeit needs to remember who he is before it's too late.
If you have questions, well, of course you do. Russell Hoban was a hugely influential author of weird literature, which says a lot. The book barges into your mind like the parade from the anime Paprika: loud and colorful. Every page bursts with humor and poetry, but the main attraction is all that WEIRDNESS. Which, for me, usually ranges from irritating to downright disorienting, sometimes enough to make me abandon a book altogether.
Talking Hospital, unauthorized nighttime trips to the Underground (which also talks!), sheets of yellow paper scattered everywhere, and some homeless guy with a red beard following around. Kleinzeit spends his time fucking around, starting a romance with Sister, getting to know his fellow patients, playing the glockenspiel, and even busking in the Underground! It's all ridiculously entertaining, but none of it seems to connect. Until it does.
Halfway through, the seemingly random threads begin to come together. The vaudeville gives way to something between a mystery and a thriller. Kleinzeit gets closer and closer to figuring out what's really going on in his hospital ward, just as Death comes knocking (don't worry, it's not scary) and Memory returns. From that point on, the book develops an almost NON-weird coherence, without losing its dark humor or poetry. The metaphors from the first half start making sense, and suddenly there's a direct parallel to the myth of... Orpheus.
If you still have no idea what I'm talking about, but you're intrigued, that's exactly the point. First Hoban did it with his book, and now I'm doing it with this review. It'll all come together.