No Man's Land (English and German Edition)

ISBN: 0805006672

Author: Walser, Martin

Condition: Used

Product Description Wolf, an East German spy and an adulterer, is torn between his wife Dorle and his lover Sylvia and becomes unsure of his own motives in his espionage career From Publishers Weekly In a short, quietly stunning novel, Walser ( Runaway Horse ) mines the espionage genre to probe the cultural and political fissures dividing the two halves of Germany. Wolf Zieger, an emotionally numb East German spy, is having an affair with sexually voracious Sylvia who works in a West German ministry where she has access to military and NATO secrets. Wolf knows his strategic romance is destroying his wife Dorle, who is 35 and wants a child, but he can't stop. Dorle will become pregnant, but not before her husband, tired of living an elaborate deception, turns himself in to West German authorities. In the tense courtroom drama which takes up the last third of the book, we are privy to Wolf's thoughts as he condemns both Germanyscommunist and capitalistfor becoming servile shield-bearers for the camps they belong to. Walser offers Wolf's burnt-out condition as an emblem of fractured postwar Germany in this artful, totally believable story. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal "When confronted by the unresolved, one must try to sidestep it," claims Wolf Ziegler, though he is doing his best to make sure the German Democratic Republic keeps up with its Western counterpart's technological advances. Wolf is a spy, but a more and more reluctant one as his thoughts increasingly contradict his actions; even as he accepts promotion to major for his effective work, he is planning to defect. In this engrossing and occasionally moving novel, Walser leaves behind the humor of Breakers ( LJ 8/87) and returns to the darker psychological examination of The Inner Man (12/84). The result is both a spy novel and an allegory for the physical and emotional partitioning of Germany. Although these national themes may be more compelling for Germans, Americans will enjoy the deft characterization and play of psychological nuance. Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State Univ., University ParkCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.