German Double Bill
BOLGER, EUGENIE
German Double Bill_ The Quest for Christa T. By Christa Wolf Translated by Christopher Middleton Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 185 pp. S5.95. Bolivian Wedding By Gudrun Pausewang Translated by...
...She is too vital and contradictory to be netted easily, however, and the narrator can do no more than retrace Chris-ta's own quest for herself...
...Later, in exchange for a chicken and a dozen eggs, she receives a charmed amulet for him from the sorceress Louisa...
...He joins the crowd of townsfolk, hawkers and celebrants at the cemetery, determined to show everyone he is still a man well able to take care of himself...
...Miss Wolf displays a gentle respect for selfhood and for spiritual values...
...Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T. is reminiscent of those dark, grainy films shown in the uptown New York houses that specialize in old foreign features with ragged sound tracks, faded subtitles, and anguished actors...
...Again the film is grainy, but the action is recorded with an objective, almost detached, clarity...
...The daughter of the village schoolmaster, she grows up, attends a university, wonders about her role in life, explores various possibilities without ever committing herself to any one of them, marries, bears children, and dies...
...Gudrun Pausewang's Bolivian Wedding, on the other hand, resembles the kind of anthropological documentary that used to be standard fare at the Museum of Modern Art...
...Without promising messages, the documentary sometimes delivers them...
...240 pp...
...The following morning the groom is to join the Army fighting in the Gran Chaco, a jungle lowland where war and disease have taken the lives of many village men...
...The resulting noisy whir becomes an annoying distraction...
...Subtle interludes, like an exchange between the police chief and the hotelkeeper, lend perspective to the portrait of the poor and ignorant...
...In the rituals and tragedy of a single day the structure of a whole society is uncovered...
...It is especially interesting to find this concern with the subtleties of individuality in a novelist who is the product of a collective society...
...Except for the upheaval at the end of World War II and the Russian occupation of her village, both of which are treated only marginally, the events of Christa's life are unexceptional...
...The groom's mother builds an altar to her two dead sons to gain their intervention on behalf of the one son left to her...
...The Quest for Christa T. succeeds in creating that fictional rarity, a character who is ordinary and engaging, complex and credible, and well worth knowing...
...Unfortunately, Miss Wolf's style is awkward and cumbersome, at least in this translation...
...In one short scene these virtues are contrasted with the materialism and frivolity of Christa's friends in West Berlin...
...A remote and mystical civilization is depicted without a trace of transcendental humbug...
...Despite its flickering images...
...characters are developed through action rather than dialogue...
...Because she focuses on the lives of the least important people of a remote civilization, her novel can be called a small undertaking: There are no overt attempts to treat major themes, no flourishes of style...
...And she demonstrates that the anguish of women who give their men to war knows no boundaries of time or place...
...Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger TWO SMALL novels from Germany bring to mind memories of afternoons at the movies...
...Bolivian Wedding By Gudrun Pausewang Translated by Denver Lindley Knopf...
...The episode illustrates how philosophical differences among individuals are more profound and divisive than any inherent differences between sociopolitical systems, which are essentially abstract and impersonal...
...In the pathos of the final scenes Miss Pausewang manages to transcend the petty cultural differences that separate the nations of men, and to highlight the human currents common to all...
...Once handsome and admired by the women, he is now blind and scarred...
...Nonetheless, illumined by the glow of Christa's character, the ordinary becomes unique: Like snowflakes under a microscope, everyday lives are made to reveal unexpected complexity...
...The book opens on the morning of All Souls' Day...
...While Miss Pausewang's novel seems simple almost to the point of being artless, it is in fact as formal, controlled and intricate as the design of a primitive rug...
...Seeming to distrust the importance of her material, she loads her prose with rhetorical questions that make it labor like a faulty projector...
...Candles are lit and offerings made at the grave of the local saint, a convicted robber...
...Set in East Germany, the author's homeland, the novel is a portrait in the form of an inquiry into the life of Christa T., who has died while still a young woman...
...She shows us those who endure injustice passively, accepting it as an act of God, as well as those who rage against it to their own destruction...
...Her bereaved friend, the narrator, tries to define Christa by interpreting and rearranging memories of her...
...In contrast, Bolivian Wedding is as straightforward as a folk tale...
...Although these films invariably hint at some portentous revelation that is never made, the viewer is as likely to leave the theater feeling moved by his experience as benumbed by it...
...It is not only told in a style suggestive of some of the novels of B. Traven, but its sympathies are similar...
...Only one, Manuel, has returned from the war, and he lives among the villagers like a vengeful ghoul...
...In many ways it is an ordinary quest...
...The characters are Indians of the Bolivian highlands, an unquestioning people whose lives are hard and whose foremost concern is for their own survival...
...A wedding party moves toward the cemetery to celebrate among the souls of departed relatives...
...Every incident counts...
...The bridal party cooks its meal on the graves of dead relatives, knowing that the spirits of those no longer present have the power to do harm if offended...
...But in its simple truthfulness Bolivian Wedding is more effective than many books whose aim and style are bolder...
...Yet a clear picture emerges of these people, their customs and beliefs...
...The scene jumps around as if filmed with a hand-held camera...
...Although she is German, Miss Pausewang authentically captures the flavor of South America...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
