[In the following review of The Distant Lover, Vliet examines the narrator's withdrawal from human relationships and the origination of her emotional barriers.]

As early as 1985, Christoph Hein was being called a major new voice in East German letters, a highly literate and socially conscious poet, playwright, novelist and critic. But The Distant Lover, first published in German in 1982, is Hein's first work to be translated into English. That it took so long is a bit surprising, given the readability of its prose and the universality of its insight.

Reading the book is an active experience, a tug of war between reader and narrator. After the dream-like prologue, showing a frightened woman caught on a narrow beam high over a dangerous chasm, unable to cross or retreat, the conscious narrator controls the board:

Even on the morning of the funeral I still wasn't sure whether I'd go. And since I didn't know what I would decide by noon, I took my mid-season coat out of the closet. It was a dark blue that might pass for black, with a rabbit-fur collar. It was obviously wrong for warm weather, but I didn't want to run around all day in a black suit. And in case I did decide to go, it seemed just as inappropriate to turn up at the cemetery in a summer dress.

As soon as we gather enough clues to figure out that the person being so casually buried is the narrator's year-long lover, we start trying to figure out Claudia herself: a divorced East German doctor whose orderly vacillation between safe, surface options seems chronic.

Elsewhere Hein has defined the human being as “the animal with the thickest skin.” His study of Claudia extends that definition. Claudia is a modern woman, looking out for her own feelings. Her mother tries hard to accept the fact that Claudia doesn't want to marry again, that she prefers the occasional sleep-over boyfriend to any lasting relationship. Claudia tries hard to put up with her parents, visiting them out of duty much less than they'd like, always annoyed at her mother's attempts to “have a good chat,” just as she is annoyed at her acquaintances' attempts to become chummy. She has, she tells us, “enough problems of her own.”

She also manages to keep her distance from her lover Henry. As her life with Henry unfolds in retrospect and we watch her carefully avoiding reaction to his daredevil driving (the only thing, he says, that makes him feel alive) and to every sort of surprise, even his unexpected visits on her boring vacation, we begin to wonder exactly what those problems are.

Hein projects his major character through refracted images and ironic parallels reminiscent of Flaubert: Claudia's neighbors, old women who smell of cheap powder or who raise smelly, noisy birds, hang onto her in the elevator, begging for free pills and spilling their woes. Her “promiscuous” nurse walks around the changing room in her dirty brassiere polishing her nails. A patient “blushes furiously” at Claudia's suggestion that the patient's medical problems may be caused by “a troubled relationship with the outside world.”

It takes several well-protected trips into Claudia's childhood, set in the political confusion of a re-organized Germany, for us to piece together the breaches of loyalty that early established this pattern of rejection. But these are not tortured, psychological diggings. Claudia narrates the story in straightforward, matter-of-fact sentences. As a well-educated doctor, she is conscious that her behaviour is repressive, but she prefers to leave it that way. In fact, we hear nothing at all about the man she has divorced until her married sister suddenly makes a devil-take-all decision to sleep with him herself, and then only the too calm recounting of his infidelities gives Claudia away.

It isn't until we re-live (distantly) the break-up of Claudia's one intense childhood friendship, and understand (between the lines of her defensiveness) the pain of its severance, that things begin to come clear, that we understand how people in this politically nebulous world can become more comfortable clamping down on their emotions than in giving them free reign.

This slim and deceptively simple novel operates on several plot levels at once. Not only is the reader-narrator tension sustained by our drive to ferret out what Claudia refuses to tell us, but Claudia's narrative itself is a living conflict between her need to cross an emotional bridge without faltering or looking down and the intense demands made by telling it. Hein's interest in the problems of socialism suggests a political reading as well. On any level, however, Claudia's crossing affords us a devastating look at one human being's triumphant arrival.