olf’s Gattling-gun novel — author as consciousness and consciousness as author — owes its existence to the 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident and Ronald Reagan’s proposed “Star Wars” missile defense system.
As a radioactive cloud contaminates European milk and vegetables, a rural writer anxiously awaits news of her younger brother’s brain surgery. Brain anatomy is rationally dissected (both grossly and insidiously) against the backdrop of irrational human decision-making (“the dark side of our nature, from which we can never liberate ourselves except through death and destruction.”) Wolf, an East German dissident for decades, is an existential skeptic: “Language which creates identity but which, at the same time, makes a decisive contribution to the dismantling of the inhibition about killing that member of the species who speaks differently.”
Her gift is metabolizing current events to a story that mixes political diatribe with a heartfelt rumination on the quintessence of folly, and hope.
