Dreary. Drab. Disconsolate.

As a fan of contemporary literary fiction, I am used to reading allegedly “plotless” novels where nothing happens, not even character development. As a fan of science fiction, I am used to reading plot-driven novels full of action, adventure, and technology. And as a fan of memoir, I am used to reading chronicles of people’s lives that blur the line between reportage and reality, usually in service of the main character’s biographical trajectory. I love a good story. It’s that simple.

But I was unprepared for how compelling a book could be that shares the mundane elements of everyday life while exploring the inner lives and consciences of its characters and providing trenchant sociopolitical analysis. All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski walks us through the last few days and weeks of the von Globig family. Minor nobles living in eastern Prussia, we happen upon them in the winter of 1945 right before the Soviet Red Army swarms into Germany. The father is an Army logistics officer working in Italy, the mother is a beautiful cipher, the son a coddled introvert, and the aunt takes care of household affairs. Published by New York Review of Books and translated by Anthea Bell, It’s all so run-of-the-mill and boring, but I couldn’t stop turning the pages.

Where Kempowski’s craft excels is in the details. He is not an over-explainer. His prose isn’t florid or prone to intense bouts of description laced with excessive adjectives. But he puts you right there – in the middle of a scene, in someone’s head, between their eyes – and asks you to see. To be. To feel. To simply exist as the characters do. While the story is set in the Second World War, he does not employ some sort of “banality of evil” framework. Instead, I feel like he argues for the “banality of existence” – life is not special, unique, or exceptional. It simply is. We simply are.

Because of their ordinariness, the von Globig family, their employees, and the various people who visit their home over the course of the book all earn their seat at the narrative table. You want to see exactly how each person responds to the meager dinner on the table that night, the weather for the day, the book they’re reading, who they see walking in the adjoining village. It’s not that their humdrum lives are engaging – far from it – but because we can see ourselves in their routines, in the simple beats of a typical life.

Yet, that normalcy quickly disintegrates when Katharina von Globig commits a fatal mistake right before the countryside hears word that the Red Army will arrive sooner than expected. The plot launches into overdrive, setting everyone’s true character in the sharpest possible relief. The boring rapidly becomes bleak as the emotional and psychological house of cards that was daily reality crumbles to the ground.

Kempowski absolutely delivers the goods, and this book is not for the fainthearted.