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"Suffering severe abdominal pain, a woman is rushed to the emergency room of a decrepit urban hospital. Her soaring temperature, her deepening distress, her body's resistance to medicine all confound her doctors, who operate repeatedly." Drifting in and out of consciousness, she endures a fever dream in which the boundaries between wakefulness, memory, and delusion blur then totally dissolve. Old friends and comforting strangers materialize at her bedside, and as they talk to her, and as the nurses poke and prod, her sense of self, of being an "I" who acts rather than a "she" who is acted upon, begins to slip away. Gurney rides through the hospital's windowless corridors become fantastic travels through the halls of hell. Remembered snatches of Goethe and of "upbuilding" Communist propaganda provide ironic running commentary on her predicament, for the scene, half real, half hallucinated, is the former East Berlin; the time, just before the fall of the Wall.
This short novel by one of former East Germany's most celebrated writers is set in a Berlin hospital a few years before reunification. A nameless woman with a life-threatening condition is rushed to the hospital, where between operations and recovery she hovers in a nether world outside of time and consciousness, life and death, in the "third zone" of a patient who is "no longer spoken to, but about." In her weakness, she is "like a toad pinned to the ground by a forked stick against the back of its neck." As in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, Wolf uses illness as a powerful metaphor for existential crisis. The stream-of-conscious narrative perfectly depicts the patient's fever-dream confusion of reality, hallucination, long-suppressed memories, and moments of insight: "how often," reflects the woman, "in the course of a lifetime do we turn into someone else and lose those with whom we were young and innocent?" A best seller in Germany, this complex, haunting tale will reward readers who stay with its unconventional narrative. Highly recommended for literary fiction collections and adventurous book groups.-Janet Evans, Pennsylvania Horticultural Soc. Lib., Philadelphia Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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