City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
*Starred Review* Defying superlatives and superbly translated, Wolf’s extraordinary, autobiographical novel describes a year in Los Angeles where the narrator/novelist is a visiting scholar at a prestigious research center. Her project: to learn the identity of the author of numerous letters to her hero and mentor. The narrator is in voluntary exile, but as a citizen of what was East Germany, she has no country to return to; and with the disappearance of her country her past is vanishing too. Written in a ruminative style, mournful and rueful, though occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, Wolf’s complex tale conveys every shade of agonized reflection on forgetting and remembering. How could she have forgotten her brief cooperation with the Stasi (the East German intelligence service)? How to explain decisions that have lost their rationale, assuming they were rational in the first place? How to explain the past to those who did not live through it? In conversations with friends and other scholars, in a city once famous for its community of German exiles, she plumbs the depths of these and many other questions. In her final novel, Wolf—who before her death in 2011 received virtually every German-language literature award, including the Deutscher Bücherpreis (German Book Prize) for her lifetime achievement—outdid herself. --Michael Autrey