The Defector - Softcover

Maron, Monika

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930523415 ISBN 13: 9780930523411

Publisher: Readers International, 2019

Synopsis

Monika Maron, the great German writer still today at the forefront of her creative generation, saw her country East Germany disappear in civil unrest, departures and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Maron in this novel looks inside Rosalind Polkowski, her semi-autobiographical heroine, exploring the freedom to be found within, despite the claustrophobic and threatening atmosphere of East German society contained by the Wall.

Deeply psychological and always engaging, Monika Maron is an important European feminist voice, giving us an intimate view of a key moment in modern German history.

 

About this title

Review:

"What in Flight of Ashes looked to be a point of destination has become complex bewilderment approaching despair. It is now only possible to be a 'defector' in your mind. Paradise has shut you out." DIE ZEIT

"Rosalind Polkowski withdraws from the world (for the world read East Germany) into her room; dreams, remembers and makes connections for the whole of one sleepless night, makes figures appear who are meant to obey her, and imagines heraelf into a better reality, where she is more able to find what it is a person seeks... Her most compact, atmospheric book so far, certainly her best and probably also her most personal." DIE WELTWOCHE

"It's not a realistic novel about escape attempts and the trauma of the Wall -- as one might expect -- but rather the story of the crossing of a frontier by which the land of dreams and memories is cleared until it is inhabitable." VORWÄRTS

"Maron writes of a woman who defects not from a country but from her life... Through all her ruminations, Rosalind seeks freedom from her past and her obsessions, an internal imprisonment sure to summon the exterior yoke of Communism." PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY

"Rosalind, and Maron herself, are on their way to another definition of self and femininity but haven't, can't have, arrived there yet, since the old models must be demolished before something new can be put in their place." WOMEN'S REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Part an expressionist drama, part surreal fiction, it crosses Strindberg with Kafka, creating a new shape to dramatize with malaise of a citizen deprived of personal freedom." BELLES LETTRES

"In the interludes the head literally becomes a stage, and the stage becomes, finally, -- analogous to an important section of Flight of Ashes -- a tribunal where the characters presume to pass judgment on Rosalind's insubordinate imagination." NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG

Synopsis:

Rosalind, an historian, discovers one day that her body will no longer allow her to go to work and that she no longer needs to eat or sleep.

About this edition

• Publisher: Readers International
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0930523415
• ISBN 13: 9780930523411
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 238