Munich

‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’ So writes Andreas Bernard in the last sentence of this touchingly Proustian memoir. He hymns a life spent flipping small steel balls up and down machines which, despite their clamorous lights, bleeps and honks, amounted to glorified beer coasters and ashtrays, usually in dank corners next to the toilets of some German bar, Italian resort arcade or glum rest stop on California’s Pacific highway. The subtitle is misleading: the book is Bernard’s biography, not the pinball machine’s. He begins his tale as a pre-pubescent, sneaking into Munich bars with his