Böcker av Monika Maron

In this extraordinary, prizewinning novel, Monika Maron says farewell to the East Germany where she grew up as the stepchild of an élite communist official not unlike retired Professor Beerenbaum, who hires disaffected writer Rosalind Polkowski to transcribe his memoirs. Shortly after the Berlin Wall, which Maron loathed, fell and her country disappeared, she returned home to write this subtle yet scathing look at herself living among the thinkers, drinkers, and elderly believers who kept the communist state going to the very end.Part argument with her father and cry of pain across the grave, part exploration of her own role and guilt as a follower in the GDR's sad funeral procession, Silent Close No. 6 has lost none of its depth of feeling, its power or its honesty.With her sharp feminist vision, Monika Maron spares neither foolish lovers, nor dilettantes, nor the upholders of state power - and certainly not herself.Here is essential reading to understand the Germany of yesterday, and also that of today."Icy prose." NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW"Maron writes with wit, economy and stylistic assurance." THE VILLAGE VOICE"One of the best writers of her generation." LE MONDE

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.

MONIKA MARON, today one of Germany's greatest living writers, created Flight of Ashes and the wonderfully feisty Josepha Nadler when she herself was struggling to leave East Germany, a struggle that involved her elite communist family, the STASI, her future career, and her own conscience.The young journalist's visit to the filthy industrial town of B Bitterfeld in the center of the GDR challenges her moral and political assumptions and plunges her into the personal and professional battle of her life.Today our horror at pollution is widespread, but in some of our own democratic societies and stripped of the old communist rhetoric, we are still asked like Josepha to look away, ignore the facts and the flue ash keep quiet and keep smiling.From the review in PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY:"e;A poignant tale of a woman's battle to be herself impatient, honest, emotional and a dreamer like her peasant grandfather in a society where people think and move like robots."e;

Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, the author grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. This title tells her family's powerful and heroic story.

The narrator relives meeting her lover, Franz, at the natural history museum, when, for the first time in her life, she experiences all-consuming love and absolute happiness. Ultimately the affair founders because of her inability to believe that Franz will actually leave his wife.