Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

Sep 13, 2025 3:04 AM

Author:Hans Fallada

'...I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them. Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why didn't it ever occur to me before: coffee is my friend!'

Drawing on Hans Fallada's own history of addiction, these two stories and are written with a remarkable, tough, spartan clarity. As a man desperately, haplessly tries to get enough morphine to make it through the day and a drunk embezzler struggles to get himself arrested, they are at one second crushing, the next darkly comic.

This book includes A Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism and Three Years of Life.

Reviews

C. K. Stead is challenging, fun, urbane and brilliant. Read him

—— Spectator

Stead's book delights in subtle comedy and takes care to puncture all kinds of minor myths...Written with glowing simplicity and rich in delicate humour...[A] thought-provoking, witty and highly topical novel

—— James Wood , Daily Telegraph

[An] elegant, calm novel...Stead writes a cool, reasonable prose......Stead maintains an eye unblinkingly opposed to the transcendental

—— Guardian

A subtly potent revisionist account of the life and death of Jesus

—— Sunday Times

A gifted and intelligent novelist

—— Independent

CK Stead, New Zealand's most distinguished man of letters - scholar, critic and poet, as well as novelist - has written a fiction that is remarkable, intelligent and moving

—— Allan Massie , Scotsman

Brilliantly imagined...Among Stead's many achievements is a convincing social, political and physical backdrop...his creation of a coherent, rival story - clever, moving and sometimes witty, with fully human characters - is nothing short of a revelation

—— Sam Phipps , Herald

A pleasingly unpredictable mix of traditional and radical... It's clever, thought-provoking

—— Independent

'A grand recounting of the second Punic War...Durham's epic is truly a big, magnificent, sprawling story complete with a sizable cast of compelling characters, intricately drawn battle scenes and fluid, graceful prose'

—— Booklist (starred review)

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