Reviewing the work in the "London Review of Books" in 1990, Patrick Parrinder stated that "The Sorrow" "presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem as inevitable as breathing." He noted that "while Claus’s novel is a major exercise in the recovery of buried historical experience, it is weirder and more idiosyncratic than this summary suggests. It is a chronicle not only of the years of social deprivation and darkness but of the 'slimy, inner civil war' in the protagonist’s consciousness."