The Quest for Christa T.

This is a difficult book to describe. The author is writing about the life of a woman she knew who is destroyed by life under the communist regime in East Germany. It speaks to the reader about the dangers of totalitarianism, the freedom and beauty of the human spirit, and about relationships. The relationship between the author and the title character is in itself interesting. She is trying to keep the memory of Christa alive, and yet the author seems to say at times that she doesn't know if she even really knew Christa. As usual, this novel has alot of Wolf's brilliant examinations of the nature of memory -- memory is a recurring theme in all her novels. Wolf's gifts for language, imagery, and insight are stunning. The translation is well done. This is one of the best books I've ever read. I highly reccommend it.

Christa T. is the story of a woman growing up in post-war East-Germany - under Communist rule. She is not openly hostile to the regime, but she is a woman who does not fit in, a dreamer and a romantic. Her life is not outwardly dramatic: She reads literature at university, works as a teacher, marries a vet and lives far away from the big city, but this intensely private life was in itself an act of rebellion in a country which wanted fervent supporters of Communist doctrine, and which expected writers to celebrate tough workmen. Christa T. is also the story of a woman trying to find the words to write about another woman's life, and this is "The Quest for Christa T." - Christa Wolf ranks among the best authors now writing in German, and the quiet tragedy of Christa T. is one of her most moving books.

Christa Wolf brilliantly succeeds in creating a new literary space, one that surfaces during the interplay and transition between subjectivity and objectivity. Through the course of her novel she writes somewhere between the "I" and the "you"; in this shifting, elliptical state we begin to understand that the self is neither wholly interior nor exterior, and that the quest for self-knowledge can be as lyrical, as immediate, and as maddeningly unreachable as her prose. An incredible book