Wolf, Christa (Vol. 29) - Rex Last
REX LAST
Unter den Linden, by Christa Wolf, who wrote Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968), is subtitled "Three Improbable Tales", and the subject-matter is certainly out of the ordinary. In the title story, a young woman relives, in a dream, an unhappy affair; in the second, an unusually gifted cat, a descendant of Hoffmann's Kater Murr, eavesdrops—and sceptically comments—on his master dreaming of physical and spiritual happiness; and the third is a report by a volunteer who undergoes a sex change in the course of testing the drug "Petersein Masculinum 199", but ultimately resorts to an injection of the antidote in order to revert to being a woman.
The time and place of these stories ranges from Berlin with its persistent echoes of the past to the year 1992, but there are dominant common features: each has a questing and questioning first-person narrator, a preoccupation with speculation and dream-worlds, and a university teacher of one kind...
[The entire page is 236 words long]
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