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Christa Wolf Divided soul

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Culture | Christa Wolf Divided soul A reassessment of East Germany's most famous writer Save Share Jul 13th 2013 | 4 min read They Divided the Sky. By Christa Wolf. Translated by Luise von Flotow. University of Ottawa Press; 203 pages; C$18.95 and £12.95. Buy from Amazon.com , Amazon.co.uk City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr Freud. By Christa Wolf. Translated by Damion Searls. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 315 pages; $27. Buy from Amazon.com CHRISTA WOLF, an East German writer known for her perspectives on power, was for a long time a serious contender for the Nobel prize in literature. Then the East German state ceased to exist in 1990, and the reputation of its most celebrated author also imploded. In 1993 Wolf was revealed to have been an informer for the secret police, the Stasi. Worse, to West German critics, she delayed publishing her own account of being spied upon, a novella written in 1979 and entitled “What Remains”, until the Berlin Wall came down. In her last years ...
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Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37

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  The Paris Review Subscribe Derek Walcott , The Art of Poetry No. 37 Interviewed by Edward Hirsch Issue 101, Winter 1986 Derek Walcott, ca. 2012. Photograph Jorge Mejía Peralta   I went to visit Derek Walcott on his home island of St. Lucia in mid-June, 1985. St. Lucia is one of the four Windward Islands in the eastern Caribbean, a small mountainous island that faces the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Caribbean Sea on the other. For a week Walcott and I stayed in adjacent bungalows, called Hunt’s Beach Cottages, just a few miles from the harbor city of Castries, where he was born and raised. Outside of our large, mildly ramshackle cottages, a few stone tables and chairs were cemented into a strip of grass; beyond was a row of coconut trees and then, just a few yards away, what Walcott has called “the theater of the sea,” the Caribbean. One is always aware of the sea in St. Lucia—an inescapable natural presence that has deeply affected Walcott’s sense of being an islander,...
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