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A review by korrick
No Place on Earth by Christa Wolf
4.0
4.5/5
It's nice to be positively surprised by a book every once in a while. It's not like I expected Wolf to crash and burn, but after so many revisits to various authors that largely didn't live up to previous reads (if only by a little), expectations were tempered, especially with the unknown historical chasm yawning before me. To go from entire books with nary a ripped up receipt or online status update marking a place of especial insight to at least a combined six or so in the space of barely 120 pages is always gratifying to see. So, it turns out that, sometimes, it's rewarding to be, in a way, predictable (is it even possible for me to add more commas? maybe if I really tried). It's a good thing then that Wolf still has a healthy number of works left for me to stumble over, including one that's been taunting me from its residency on various book lists of repute, so that's one more name to add to the used bookstore list (tomorrow marks the first of intentionally planned monthly used bookstore visits until book sales come back, so here's hoping I get lucky). Of course, I've also been making plans to energetically cultivate literary relationships with one particular sector of unknowns by turning my brain off and my faith on, as well as finally start unblocking the calcified lag on my bookshelves that I've left lying for five years or so in earnest, but there's room for them all now that I don't have to worry so much about it all being burned down anymore.
How fortunate that our thoughts do not dance in visible letters above our heads! If they did, any contact between human beings, even harmless social gatherings such as this, could easily become a convocation of murderers. Or we might learn to rise above ourselves, to gaze without hatred into the distorting mirrors which other people represent to us. And without feeling any impulse to shatter the mirrors. But she knows we are not made that way.Wolf is never one whom you can read without a healthy dose of historical literary context. From ancient texts in Latin or Greek to her own reality of Soviet East Germany, I wish the best of luck to those scoffers at introductions, afterwords, and notes both end and foot, for this is not the kind of writing that tucks lackadaisical "I only read for entertainment" readers in at night, however much one can technically classify most of it as historical fanfiction. As such, while acquiring this work was a matter of readerly lust at first sight, I did a fair amount of shying away from a text whose subject material was familiar only to me on the strength of a single name, one belonging to yet another troubled white boy praised to high heavens in certain, largely airlocked, literary communities. And yet, when I finally got to it, I found that, thanks to the respectable amount of endnotes for such a brief piece, I could have afforded to read this earlier; perhaps even much earlier, although my five-years-younger lack of awareness of the value of such a thin, foreign-sounding book would have undoubtedly passed it before I was introduced to the phenomenon that is [b:The Quest for Christa T.|153479|The Quest for Christa T.|Christa Wolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311992432l/153479._SY75_.jpg|148158]. So, much of it appeals in ways I remember succumbing to far more thoroughly in the past, and as much as I want to tell these two sobbing souls to grow up and live a little, I also recognize how much of this current attitude of mine is objectivity, how much of it is practicality, and how most of it is smugness at having surpassed some of my highest hopes and established some amount of relative financial independence. So, to me and anyone else out there who have similar thoughts when faced with depression, apathy, and loathsome despair: don't kid yourself. What got you here was 3% work and 97% luck and circumstance. There but for the and all that jazz.
...in a state of unspeakable destitution which he mistook for peace...I have a digital shelf devoted to authors who ended their own lives. There's some contention over whether this was the case for a few of them, but for the vast majority, the line is clearly drawn in the sand. In any case, what purpose does it serve. A reminder? A warning? A comfort? A handful of these authors have written some of my absolute favorites; one of them, more than one. A sizable number were also bigoted gits, and it's rather obscene how much certain ones were allowed to get away with while they were amongst the living, with the excuses for them now that they are dead being even more so. Wolf being who she is, I'd like to think she did enough due diligence in drawing up Kleist with all his qualities both ideologically transcendent and odiously submissive: his (fictional) recognition of the far less historically reverenced [a:Karoline von Günderrode|1300405|Karoline von Günderrode|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1573282374p2/1300405.jpg] as a kindred spirit has almost nothing to do with his acknowledging her as an equal. And yet, it took little more than an hour of dwelling on the question of how I could go about composing this review for my throat to become tight and the panic to well in my chest, as the psychological mechanisms that kept me safe from ages four to eleven and then alive from eleven to twenty-five are hardly going to stop working now. That serves as some sort of indicator that Wolf knew what she was writing about, yes? For the choice to write about two literary figures who both ended their own lives two to seven years after the fictional events portrayed in this novel can be made for any number of reasons: indeed, it's not an unreasonable assumption to make that the average author of some repute who hails from my country would have a hard time of making anything other than tragedy porn out of such a germinal point of reference. An unfair one to make in some circumstances, but until I feel comfortable about being open about being insane to more than my inner circle in this country, that's how it stands.
I am unable to divide the world into good and evil, into two branches of reason, into healthy and sick. If i wanted to divide the world, I should have to turn the ax on myself, cleave my inner self in twain and offer the two halves to the disgusted public so that they would have good cause to wrinkle up their noses and say: Whatever has happened to wholesome entertainment? Yes indeed, what I have to put on display is unclean. Not something you would bite into and swallow down. Something to make you run away...This is a historical piece unconcerned with race, colonialism, and most of the gender/sexuality matter (Kleist's sister apparently had a famous instance of crossdressing in public, while Günderrode had a habit of imagining/characterizing herself as a man that was persistent enough to merit academic attention, if nothing else), so the themes are ones I used to incessantly pick at until those less whitewashed ones came my way: time, progress, art versus science, male versus female, the state versus the individual, social conformity, mental stability, the past, the future, and, ultimately, how much of you is you and how much of it is a rat race. After a week of dealing a pandemic, a wildfire, and more blatant demonstrations by US police forces that they never outgrew their slave hunting/KKK/white militia heritage, it's almost relaxing to dive back into the questions that utterly consumed me back when I was young, for while I haven't made my peace with capitalist hellscape of it all, I have developed enough of autopilot personality to make my way through it. It's not as if I don't find all of them very serious indeed, but that I recognize that, tackling them without taking on all the less chic systemic issues rage around the landscape two centuries after this work's last historically based protagonist drowned themselves has, and will, accomplish nothing more but transmogrifying the shape of the beast. A sensitive, learned, and even prophetic landscape is written here, for sure, but not without its fair share of naiveté that makes it impossible for me to ever return.
It's nice to be positively surprised by a book every once in a while. It's not like I expected Wolf to crash and burn, but after so many revisits to various authors that largely didn't live up to previous reads (if only by a little), expectations were tempered, especially with the unknown historical chasm yawning before me. To go from entire books with nary a ripped up receipt or online status update marking a place of especial insight to at least a combined six or so in the space of barely 120 pages is always gratifying to see. So, it turns out that, sometimes, it's rewarding to be, in a way, predictable (is it even possible for me to add more commas? maybe if I really tried). It's a good thing then that Wolf still has a healthy number of works left for me to stumble over, including one that's been taunting me from its residency on various book lists of repute, so that's one more name to add to the used bookstore list (tomorrow marks the first of intentionally planned monthly used bookstore visits until book sales come back, so here's hoping I get lucky). Of course, I've also been making plans to energetically cultivate literary relationships with one particular sector of unknowns by turning my brain off and my faith on, as well as finally start unblocking the calcified lag on my bookshelves that I've left lying for five years or so in earnest, but there's room for them all now that I don't have to worry so much about it all being burned down anymore.
People who are not deceived about themselves will extract something fresh out of the foment of every age, simply by lending it expression. I feel that the world could not go on if this were not done.Love, suicide, art, work, poetry, the family, the estate, the country, protests in the streets, elections in the sheets, and the plague is still upon my section of the globe. Kleist and Günderrode are dead, and I am alive; let's make the most of it, shall we?