[In the following review, Glass-Wickersham praises Maron's prose in Animal Triste and compliments the novel for being “eminently accessible.”]

Monika Maron lived in the German Democratic Republic until 1988. She now resides in Berlin. Her earlier publications include three novels and a volume of essays in Fischer editions. Her participation in the activities of the Stasi (state-security service) during the post-Wall years has been widely discussed.

Maron's new novel has the interesting title Animal Triste. The work is about the human being as animal but also as spirit, about the aftereffects of sexual love but also the existential sadness of individuals and of an entire generation. It is a first-person narrative by a woman of uncertain age who has withdrawn from life, devoting herself to reliving a lost love affair, or each moment of the experience which she can recall. The novel is immeasurably more than a love story, however. It is about the effects of the two Germanies on the lives of the generation born during the war. It is also a commentary on feelings evoked by the changing face of Eastern Europe, its disruptive reconstruction, and its struggle for redefinition on both the individual and the collective level.

Replete with metaphors which never dominate but nevertheless frame the narrative, Maron's novel investigates the idea of time and memory, of transience and durability in the image of a dinosaur skeleton, for example, with which the woman and her married lover have a special relationship. This collection of old bones, most of them imitations fashioned to complete the form, is like many features of the narrative, such as the yellow construction cranes visible in every quarter of the constantly changing city of Berlin. The interpretive possibilities of this dinosaur skeleton and the narrator's professional as well as personal interest in it constitute a great strength of the book.

Animal Triste also investigates the kinds of relationships possible for mature couples whose lives are calcified into patterns that are difficult to disrupt. Perhaps tongue-in-cheek, the work justifies some traditionally illicit love affairs with the novel excuse that the isolation of the eastern part of Germany made impossible until recently any acquaintance between certain individuals. Since the narrator refuses to tell her story in verifiable terms, it reads like a mystery, and we cannot be certain whether the lover has left, has died, or even whether the narrator has murdered him.

Beyond its focus on the sacrifices made for love by women like the narrator, Maron's novel contains a small cast of interesting characters. There is a wonderful description of a trip to New York, and the use of South Hadley, Massachusetts, where the narrator has longed to view dinosaur footprints, is also effective. Animal Triste is not only eminently accessible, even to students of German, but is an affecting document as well, certainly a witness to the joy and sadness of love but also to the effects of political upheaval on generations which will never experience the continuity that many, especially but not only in the West, have taken for granted.