City of Angels

November 19, 2012
In 1992, East German author Wolf was a resident scholar at the Getty Institute; this book, published in 2010, a year before her death, is the fictional account of her time there. Almost diaristic, the book details her routines as she learns her way around Los Angeles, connects with her fellow scholars (a friendly group of mostly Europeans), and holds fraught meetings with Holocaust survivors and their adult children. Wolf includes notes she made at the time, but also admits that when you’re “telling the story from the end... you run the risk of pretending you know less than you really do,” a reminder of the difficulty of locating the dividing line between truth and invention. Which may be the point: the GDR no longer exists, but Wolf still travels on her old passport; as East Germany’s most famous writer, she was both punished and feted, as well as decried for being too cozy with the regime. And then it comes to light that Wolf was not only monitored by the Stasi (the files constituted 42 volumes) but was also briefly an informant, a fact she is mystified to find that she’s forgotten. Although not much happens in this book, there’s an odd fascination in watching Wolf navigate depression, guilt, anger, and Los Angeles, home of earlier generations of German refugees and émigrés. And we get, too, an insider’s view of the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, complete, as such views are, with dropped details and omitted linkages that create more confusion and more interest. The book is slow in places and fizzles at the end with a trip to the desert, but it’s worth it to see Wolf grappling with a past that, far from being dead, is live—like ammunition.

November 1, 2012
The German novelist Wolf's final book opens with a disclaimer stating that none of the characters or situations in the book are true. But because the book is based on a real turn in Wolf's life--the discovery in 1992 that she once collaborated with East Germany's secret police, the Stasi--the truth isn't quite that straightforward. In fact, very little in this fascinating book is. Wolf's actual collaboration took place in the early '60s; by most accounts she provided little information and opposed the regime for the rest of her life. More relevant is the fact that Wolf had lost all memory of the incident and was as shocked by the revelation as the German public was. Originally published in Germany before her death in late 2011, this is an autobiographical novel with a hypnotically blurred sense of reality, documenting the author's stay in Los Angeles when the scandal broke. Even before the truth is revealed, the narrator lives as a refugee: Chance encounters and dinner-party conversation point out the distance between the author and her surroundings, as does one scene that finds her reading Thomas Mann's diaries while Star Trek blares from the television. The unreliability of memory becomes a theme as the author's narrative blurs with that of "L," an older immigrant whose story she is researching. The final sequence, a journey through a Native American dreamscape, finds the narrator facing the end of her life and making peace with uncertainty. The book's poetry should appeal to an American audience even if the political context sometimes gets lost in translation.

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September 15, 2012

Distinguished author/critic Wolf, originally from East Germany, won the first Deutscher Bucherpress for lifetime achievement. This final novel (she died in 2011) draws on an unsettling discovery she made while perusing her Stasi files: she herself had informed in the early 1960s--something she recalled not at all.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2013
Defying superlatives and superbly translated, Wolf's extraordinary, autobiographical novel describes a year in Los Angeles where the narrator/novelist is a visiting scholar at a prestigious research center. Her project: to learn the identity of the author of numerous letters to her hero and mentor. The narrator is in voluntary exile, but as a citizen of what was East Germany, she has no country to return to; and with the disappearance of her country her past is vanishing too. Written in a ruminative style, mournful and rueful, though occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, Wolf's complex tale conveys every shade of agonized reflection on forgetting and remembering. How could she have forgotten her brief cooperation with the Stasi (the East German intelligence service)? How to explain decisions that have lost their rationale, assuming they were rational in the first place? How to explain the past to those who did not live through it? In conversations with friends and other scholars, in a city once famous for its community of German exiles, she plumbs the depths of these and many other questions. In her final novel, Wolfwho before her death in 2011 received virtually every German-language literature award, including the Deutscher Bcherpreis (German Book Prize) for her lifetime achievementoutdid herself.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)