Silent Close No. 6 - Hardcover

Maron, Monika

3.59

199 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0930523938 ISBN 13: 9780930523930

Publisher: UNKNO, 1993

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Monika Maron was born in wartime Berlin in 1941 to an anti-fascist mother of Polish Jewish ancestry and a German father. Her step-father was the first Minister of the Interior of the new East German state, having been chief of police.
Following her early upbringing in a Communist family, Maron joined the Party in 1965, thinking to oppose "anti-democratic" tendencies from within the Party. She soon understood, however, that "you cannot close up a people in a wall." She left the Party and worked in television, as a drama school teacher, and for six years as a journalist.
Silent Close No. 6 concerns one of the high Communist rulers, whose self-explanations are never allowed to justify his past actions. The novel is an important critique of Germany's recent past by one of the country's leading intellectuals.

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Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

From Publishers Weekly:

This third novel by Maron ( The Defector ), whose books were banned in her native East Germany, is a first-person narrative by an intellectual who is similarly disgusted by the East German regime. Rosalind has opted out of "thinking in return for money" to take a position as scribe to Herbert Beerenbaum, an old man who is compiling his memoirs. It turns out, not surprisingly, that he is a functionary of the Party and no innocent. Ultimately, Rosalind is faced with a difficult moral choice when she discovers that Beerenbaum got one of her friends imprisoned (and, it is strongly implied, tortured) 20 years earlier. Maron conveys this tale in a gracefully tangled narrative that cross-cuts between Beerenbaum's funeral and Rosalind's account of her relationship with him and with others in her life. Maron manages as well to intersperse seemingly digressive references to Mozart's Don Giovanni and discussions of the nature of freedom. She has a mordant wit that can express itself in memorable one-liners ("in German, the only thing feminine about freedom is its grammatical gender. . . .") and in her book's oblique but cunning transitions. Marinelli's translation gets a bit lumpy at times, but on the whole the novel succeeds brilliantly.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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