This Is Not A Love Song, by Karen Duve, translated by Anthea Bell

Fat chances on football field and in love fuel comedy of obesity

As part of the World Cup celebrations, the German tourist authorities have launched a hearts-and-minds campaign that aims to charm their stereotype-prone neighbours.

Frankly, with the younger British target audience, I think they should go easy on the cuckoo-clock villages and instead distribute copies of Karen Duve's This is Not a Love Song. The German writer's second novel starts with Paul Gascoigne, ends with Gareth Southgate, nods to landmark hits from the glam, punk and disco eras -and delivers scene after scene of such outrageously black and bleak humour that it leaves our Mr Gervais looking just a little tame.

The book unfolds via a succession of life-defining flashbacks as its lovelorn, overweight heroine flies to London. There, the smug and sleek man who is the long-term object of her hopeless desire has tickets to the Euro 1996 semi-final - when Southgate's match-losing penalty miss against Germany condemned fans to (at least) 10 more years of hurt.

By now, 16-stone Anne has endured more than 30 years of misery. We track her ill-starred upbringing and grasp the murky forces that have made her body swell and her soul shrivel. Yet Duve somehow manages to fill this slow slide into gross obesity, self-harm and all-round psychic meltdown with a panoply of excruciating comic moments.

Parents, teachers, boys, food itself: all conspire to betray poor not-so-little Anne. In the background unrolls the naff suburban culture of 1970s and 1980s Hamburg - which, from Bowie and Lego to Milky Ways, feels painfully familiar.

Adulthood brings not relief but more control, as Anne flunks the exams for a tax-inspector's career (her dad's "idea of a dream profession"). She settles down as a tough-cookie cab driver who dabbles in gruesome therapy workshops and even a hilarious SM orgy - more Mike Leigh than Sacher-Masoch. All the time, an unrequited passion for the perfect Peter Hemstedt sharpens her sorrow. His posting to a suitably swanky job in London draws her to the city as that decisive semi-final looms.

"What curses were spoken over my cradle?" hapless Anne wails. By and large, Duve leaves us to answer that, as her flair for skin-crawling comic crises and keen ear for the ever-changing backing-tracks of pop culture drive the book along. It's also blessed by a pacy and pitch-perfect translation from the incomparable Anthea Bell. Read it and weep, and cringe, and chortle.