At Death's Edge
SMITH, SARAH HARRISON
At Death's Edge Grace By Linn Ullmann Translated by Barbara Haveland Knopf. 130 pp. $20.00. In the Flesh By Christa Wolf Translated by John S. Barrett Godine. 144 pp. $24.95. Reviewed...
...Ullmann, the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, has treated a death at the hands of a spouse before...
...In her preceding novel, Stella Descending (2003), a woman falls to her death from a rooftop after receiving an embrace—or was it a shove?—from her husband...
...And then there is the attractive glitter of some inherited money Johan will leave behind, intended for the son of his first marriage...
...Somehow one doubts she is telling Johan the truth, and her abortion of the unwanted child casts an unbecoming light on her comparison of the terminally ill to infants...
...In the patient's brain the various and clashing layers of German history are unearthed in scattered, dreamlike disorder...
...unable to resist the impulse he pushes Alice—who can't swim—into a pond...
...She was nevertheless able to write as well as to travel to the West, including the United States, in her role as one of her country's most widely translated intellectuals...
...The patient is haunted by echoes of a rich culture that seems largely forgotten by the younger doctors and nurses attending her...
...Despite her criticisms of her government, Wolf opposed the reunification of East and West Germany, a stance that informs our understanding of the metaphors in this fiction...
...Under the influence of painkillers and anesthesia administered by a beautiful woman (allusively named Kora, who like her namesake, a predecessor of Persephone, travels between the shadowy nether world and the sunny world on the earth's surface), the patient recalls her life as a spied-upon yet privileged artist and dissident...
...Like the best myths, her import does not overwhelm the pleasures of her narrative...
...Even taking in food by mouth and walking alone seem impossible after weeks of reliance on an IV and a wheeled bed...
...Her heroine is a patient at an East German hospital shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall...
...Mai is not criminal, she is human...
...Instead, she has Johan tell us facts about Mai, whom he loves very much, that suggest she might not be a completely pragmatic partner to her husband's wishes...
...The unsettling scene, at once amusing and frightening, sets the tone for further ambiguities and masked intentions when Johan, as a much older man, falls ill with cancer and begs his second wife, a doctor named Mai, to help him end his life...
...She also remembers songs like "Build Up, Build Up," which voice the optimism of the East German Youth Movement, plus snatches of Nazi propaganda in other songs and bits of Mein Kampf...
...In the Flesh may sound insufferably pedantic, but Wolf weaves her web so loosely and with such humor that it is pleasantly difficult to discern her broader pattern in the course of reading...
...Marital hostility and its relationship to marital love is a fascinating theme, and in Grace one feels that by reversing the sex of the dying partner Ullmann has been able to explore different motivations, expectations and concerns...
...I won't...
...Our knowledge of Mai's frailties taints her providing the lethal injection that Johan at one point requested...
...Always fascinated by myth, she has mastered the ability of those stories to function both as tale and metaphor...
...The patient, who has suspected that she may be the victim of some conspiracy to keep her hospitalized and medicated, begins to question her own complicity in her illness...
...In very different ways they deal with love, pain and death...
...But her smile at his claim touches Johan, and he reflects lovingly that "she was still the prettiest woman in the world...
...It goes against everything that is good and beautiful and true...
...Like the patient, the strain she endured resulted in recurrentillnesses...
...Ullmann never overtly questions Mai's intentions but conveys that she is a flawed, normal woman who might have mixed emotions about her husband's death...
...Wolf suggests the enormous challenge posed by learning self-suffiency...
...Mai is, for a start, a liar who deceives him about matters as trivial as the state of the weather or what she is wearing...
...One realizes that in the eyes of a different sort of person, the image of a helpless infant, or infantilized patient, might invoke care and succor rather than the urge to "terminate...
...It is an extraordinary small book that begins with the word "hurting...
...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Author, "The Fact Checker's Bible" Both of these books are really novellas...
...Christa Wolf's latest novel, In the Flesh, appears when the author is 75...
...Wolf's political preoccupations are personalized here...
...Will it ever get to him...
...Johan and Mai do voice impassioned defenses of euthanasia...
...Mai says, crying, "people who are dying, old, or sick or both, are reduced to helpless infants—first by nature, then by hospitals...
...She has ended a pregnancy without allowing Johan any say in the matter, insisting that something is terribly wrong with the baby...
...Unnamed, she experiences repeated surgeries for an abdominal infection requiring drugs from the West...
...I can't see that happen to you...
...It is not an easy end...
...Snippets of Goethe, Brahms, Brecht, and the Grimms flit through her drugged consciousness, leaving traces of emotion, sentiment, transient patriotism, and a sense of a once shared German heritage...
...Nor does Johan's account of his final moments offer any complacencies...
...In a way, he tries to kill her earlier...
...After Johan is fired from his job as a journalist because of a humiliating bout of plagiarism, Mai's love for him seems as steady as ever, but the reader can't help wondering whether this very successful pediatrician is not slightly disillusioned with her failed husband...
...His first wife annoys him, so when she is hit by a car he can hardly mourn: "Johan often thought that if Alice had not, after 20 years of marriage, been run over and silenced at last by a black station wagon in downtown Oslo, he would have had to run her over himself...
...The illness is critical and her recovery represents a turning point in the life of the patient as an individual and as a representative of her society...
...In these details the protagonist seems to resemble Wolf, whose criticism of the East German government earned her intense scrutiny by the Stasi...
...Though Wolf may have felt that East Germany was better off as an independent state, her patient's eventual improvement implies that she feels some kind of radical treatment, even requiring the help of the West—in the form of those imported drugs—was necessary for continued survival...
...But don't let that put you off...
...Despite its dark subject, Barbara Haveland's elegant and colloquial translation from the Norwegian makes this poignant, thought-provoking work a delight to read...
...Is that what they mean by respect for human life...
...Her memory and its diffuse—possibly dying—elements become a symbol of the people's past, both public and intimate...
...But Ullmann refuses to offer reassurance that Johan's assisted death serves him well...
...Norway, unlike some of its northern cousins, has not legalized the measure, and to the author's credit she does not proselytize for or against it...
...Johan, the protagonist of Linn Ullmann's Grace, has been married twice...
...Though slight in size and deceptively light in tone, Grace is a weighty and subtle portrayal of the uncertainties surrounding euthanasia...
...He tells her he did it because he loves her, a statement so unlikely that at first the reader thinks it is the sort of ridiculous excuse only a wife could believe...
Vol. 88 • February 2005 • No. 1
