Accident: A Day's News: A Novel

by Christa Wolf, Heike Schwarzbauer, Rick Takvorian

Overview

An East German writer, awaiting a call from the hospital where her brother is undergoing brain surgery, instead receives news of a massive nuclear accident at Chernobyl, one thousand miles away. In the space of a single day, in a potent, lyrical stream of thought, the narrator confronts both mortality and life and above all, the import of each moment lived-open, as Wolf reveals, to infinite analysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226905068
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/29/2001
Series:	Phoenix Fiction
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	121
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Christa Wolf, born in 1929, is the author of many novels and stories including Cassandra, Pattern of Childhood, No Place on Earth, The Quest for Christa T., and What Remains and Other Stories, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Accident/ A Day's News
Translator's Notes

Recipe

On a flawless spring day in late April, an East German writer awaits a call from the hospital where her brother is undergoing brain surgery and instead receives news of a massive nuclear accident at Chernobyl, one thousand miles away. In a potent, lyrical stream of thought, the narrator confronts both mortality and life and, above all, the importance of each moment lived.

Editorial Reviews

East German writer Wolf's ( Cassandra ) latest novel, a slender, claustrophobic monologue, distinguishes itself from much contemporary fiction in focussing on the essential: the destructive demiurge lurking under the human skullcap, a destructiveness apparently inextricably linked to our creative intelligence. But she fails to say anything illuminating or fresh about this well-worn subject or, except glancingly, to say it in an interesting way. Her 60-ish narrator, a grandmother living alone in a German village, is much occupied with tending her garden, but most of all--against a backdrop of beautiful spring weather--with the Chernobyl disaster then in progress. At the same time, in neat juxtaposition, she is preoccupied with the operation her brother is undergoing for a brain tumor. An epigraph and references make it clear that Wolf drew substantially on Carl Sagan's popular writings which, provocatively pithy as they may sometimes be, are insufficient in themselves to furnish an interesting novel. The culminating citation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness draws attention all too invidiously to Wolf's failure to develop her heartfelt perceptions, with the requisite creative and subtle imagination, into a novel that moves the heart and mind. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Where is the danger zone for humanity today? For an East German writer, struggling with her thoughts on the day of her brother's surgery in April 1986, it's near the Chernobyl reactor's glowing core, near a brain tumor's malignant cells. Engulfed by these concerns, she offers the monologue that forms this truly remarkable novel, a speculative consideration of human knowledge versus technology by a mind forced ``to overcome reluctance.'' As the knife cuts deeper into her brother's diseased tissue, the writer questions how she has come to know her world and whether ``there is such a thing as an established right to luck.'' Wolf is in the vanguard of German writers, and this novel's popularity in West Germany (where it was a best seller for 26 weeks) demonstrates the timeliness of her themes.-- Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park

Library Journal

"Wolf's books are difficult, like certain kinds of prayers. But finishing them, the reader is covered by a sense of completeness, of having been taken on a journey in the company of the sphere who has started, with attention, mercy and courage, into the world's heart." -- The New York Times Book Review

Mary Gordon

"A profound and courageous work. Wilson's recording and experience of loss, impotence and terror. To read this novel is to plunge into that abyss in the best possible company." -- The Nation

Elayne Rapping