Already clearly nostalgic (occasionally overly so) when it was written 85 years ago, a series of short stories set in Tallinn regarding death and how it's dealt with in a world where, with history always right around the corner and the "old" Europe rapidly becoming something different, there's no clear boundary between the living and the dead. The citizens of then-Reval, Germans, Russians, Estonians and Swedes, from the highest to the lowest, finding themselves faced with the very physical manifestation of their mortality, a dead body.

And it's funny. The sort of funny that doesn't necessarily dismiss what's important, just puts it in perspective. The old woman running a perpetually empty home for people who are accidentally buried alive, the eel fisher (hello, Grass!) who "forgets" to report the death of his wife since she's such good bait, the homeless man who keeps a dead woman company since she's only using a fraction of the warm bed... All passing through, and long gone by the time it's written down, but all the more alive for it.