What does the world need to become perfect?

German cover:

Strange translation choice abounds here – I read this as “Thoughts about Christa T,” but the novel does discuss the word “Sehnsucht” a few times as well. So who knows!

(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Nachdenken-Uber-Christa-T-German/dp/3630610315)

An odd little book from an East German writer, this book feels in some ways similar to Elena Ferrante, especially the earlier novels from the Neapolitan Novels, as well as novels by Magda Szabo. It’s a curious book for numerous reasons. One, it’s a book that appears on David Bowie’s 100 books every one should read list that Duncan Jones put out a year or so after his father died. This list, among other things, is both eclectic and curated, but also quite good. Two, it’s a book that was published in East Germany, and while every book is both a reflection of and a critique the culture that produces it, it’s not exactly a dire critique of the country. Nevertheless, it was moderately suppressed within the East (specifically it was in a kind of restricted/limited release), and unlike other, say Soviet or Communist literature, it’s actually quite striking and interesting as a novel, so much as an artifact. And my language is imprecise: this is not a Communist text, just simply a text produced within a Communist country and a text that does not happen to be expressly anti-Communist in its make up.

It’s a book about female friendship, specifically two women who knew each other as girls and then later as young women in college. This is also a fragmented or impressionistic set of vignettes, conversations, and abstract-feeling scenes that do not fully meet up in a fully formed plot, so much as the collections of connections made by the narrator as she considers her friendship. It’s strange, interested, slightly frustrated and confused read, and it’s also deeply sympathetic and probing.

Here’s an example of the text:

What does the world need to become perfect?

This and this alone was the question which wrapped up in herself; but more deeply still it was the presumptuous hope that she, Christa T. herself, might be necessary for the world’s perfection. Nothing less than this could validate her life; the presumption is, of course, a daring one, and the great danger was that she might overtax herself. They weren’t empty, the warnings that came from her sister, who has stayed loyal to her village school and is even on the verge of a sensible marriage. Christa T., in the letters she writes to her, vacillates between envious admiration–how efficient she is, her sister, she gets a hold on life, doesn’t abandon herself to fruitless pondering–and the reproach that her sister is satisfied too easily and too, is resigning herself, not getting out of herself all that she might.

 

Cover Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Christa-T-Wolf/dp/0374515344)