The Adventures of a Bed Salesman, by Michael Kumpfmüller, trans. Anthea Bell

Michael Kumpfmüller has written a novel in reverse. Anyone who has been to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin will know the popular image of an East German soldier jumping over barbed wire to escape into the West two days after the GDR began building the Wall in 1961. In spring 1962, however, Kumpfmüller's womanising, alcoholic bed salesman, Heinrich Hampel, does the unthinkable: he flees for the East. "He won't have to hang himself over there, but in the West he would."

Hampel is a no-good no-hoper, what the Germans call a "Hampelmann". Born in the East, he moves with his family to the West in 1951. There the boom years see him right. He joins Franz Beds and Bedding and doubles the turnover. The secret of his success is his understanding of women, with whom he likes to test the springs of new beds.

But when Hampel opens his own outlet, he is unable to compete with Germany's raging economy or keep up with the desires of his wife, Rosa, and Bella, his mistress. He runs up a huge debt and escapes, leaving responsibilities and a trail of whisky as he heads east.

Soon, he's up to his old tricks. Rosa follows him, offering one of many last chances. Hampel takes it, and a new mistress. For work, he first delivers bread and acts as a Stasi snitch, but turns to trading black-market goods, because "even here in the East, almost everyone had something to sell or wanted to buy something". Not unlike in the capitalist West, where for Hampel both material and sexual consumption are a necessary distraction.

Once again massively in debt, he is deemed a "rudiment of the old society", and sentenced to 1,000 days in prison. There he remains, an apolitical fool. It seems Hampel is unlikely ever to change, but where he doesn't learn, others might.

Apparently, Hampel bears a close relation to one of Kumpfmüller's uncles, who died an alcoholic's death in the East. Whether that's true or not, Kumpfmüller harbours the sensitivity of a writer who knows his subject – although some German critics considered him, being a so-called "Wessi", unqualified to write about the East.

Anthea Bell's faithful translation of his rolling reported speech is a triumph, yet certain subtleties are lost from the original. These are, for one, far more the escapes and scrapes than the adventures of a bed salesman. Tragedy shades this often comic story of a man forever on the run. Hampel, the old scoundrel, will seduce you with the tale of his "pitiful but very nice" life.