Bruno Steiger is a language virtuoso, an architect of oblique and artful prose works. In Der Billardtisch he surprises us with a narrative text referring to a familiarly close reality. The narrator tells about his impossible-to-manage life as a journalist with artistic ambitions, father and husband in a one-kid nuclear family in a little house in a Zurich neighborhood. At the center of the one-kid family is naturally the boy Leo who's three-years old at the beginning of the story. His wishes drive his overly loving father insane—an almost ordinary insanity typical for nuclear families. Disaster in Der Billardtisch is realistic, trivial, grotesque, and far from tragic.