Martin Walser's first novel, Ehen in Philippsburg (Marriages in Philippsburg), appeared in 1957 and won immediate critical acclaim. Its thirty-year-old author was awarded the Hermann-Hesse prize and quickly established himself as a fulltime writer. Already explicit in this short narrative is the theme that has most preoccupied Walser throughout his long career and that continues to define his most recent work, including the four texts to be examined in this chapter, Der Augenblick der Liebe (The Moment of Love, 2004), Angstblüte (Final Flowering, 2006), Ein liebender Mann (A Man in Love, 2008), and, in greater detail, Muttersohn. The central character of Walser's debut goes by the name of Beumann, a compound that, as Tony Waine points out, invokes the English “boy-into-man.” This is not only an early instance of the many aptronyms in Walser's novels, from Anselm Kristlein (little Christ) in the trilogy Halbzeit (Half-time, 1960), Das Einhorn (The Unicorn, 1966), and Der Sturz (The Fall, 1973) to Anton Parcival (aka Percy) Schlugen in Muttersohn (not a true aptonym perhaps but an allusion to Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval masterpiece Parzival).