In the Flesh (A Verba Mundi Book) - Softcover

Wolf, Christa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567923178 ISBN 13: 9781567923179

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2007

Synopsis

Christa Wolf’s mesmerizing short novel―a bestseller in Germany―is a supreme work of political and philosophical insight by one of Europe’s great writers. Alive with myth and metaphor, rich in historical and literary allusion, it draws a nuanced, witty, and utterly compelling portrait of a person and a society close to death yet still capable of recovery.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1929, CHRISTA WOLF was brought up under the Third Reich & in Communist East Germany. Her many books include The Quest for Christa T., Patterns of Childhood, Cassandra, Medea, & What Remains. She lives in Berlin.

From Booklist

In her first novel in six years, Wolf, a brilliantly subversive novelist and profoundly eloquent critic of her native East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, creates a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness narrative as a woman lies in an ill-equipped hospital suffering from a virulent and inexplicable infection. The doctors are baffled, the nurses are frustrated by a lack of clean gowns and plastic gloves, and all are puzzled by her mysterious affliction. The valiant, curious, and witty patient, meanwhile, is assailed by visions of the underworld, in which "every variety of human victimhood" parades before her mind's eye, and by troubling memories of family and friends trying not to run afoul of the authorities in their totalitarian, and doomed, state. Wolf's richly allusive fever dream of a novel evokes the final throes of an oppressive regime, which has sickened its subjects but which cannot kill their spirit. Another potent work with universal significance by the always daring and expressive author of What Remains and Other Stories (1993) and medea (1998). Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1567923178
• ISBN 13: 9781567923179
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224