THE WONDERFUL YEARS

by Reiner Kunze ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 26, 1977

Towards the end of the ironically titled The Wonderful Years, the narrator (Kunze himself, we must assume) is asked by a new neighbor: ""Do you write what's in the newspaper or what's in real life?"" Kunze indeed writes what's in real life, the little-reported life of East Germany, and that is primarily why this slender, unsatisfying collection of vignettes--most of them seemingly autobiographical--demands attention. East Germany's next generation dominates Kunze's thoughts, and he begins with a cool observation of children at play--militarized, misinformed, stifled in their ""yearning for knowledge""--and leads up to the suicide of a high school boy who was imprisoned after trying to cross the border. A fifteen-year-old daughter (Kunze's note claims that she and her narrating father are imaginary) is the only major character to emerge;she hangs a Che Guevara poster on her bedroom wall but has a weakness for the wet-look leather and pantyhose and wire-rimmed glasses that her teachers call ""imperialistic fads""; she's taught that Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak are ""scoundrels,"" and her father, fretting over the constraints on her mind and her definition of ""porno,"" gives her a copy of the Kamasutra. Other youths--and poet-singer Wolf Biermann--surface in anecdotes: an interest in reading the Bible earns one the label of ""unstable element,"" playing a guitar qualifies as ""Disturbance of Socialist Cooperation,"" and a Catch-22 logic determines that a jazz concert is subversive because it's so orderly. The book's last section is devoted to a suspicious, wounded Czechoslovakia visited in 1968 and 1975, and to tributes to (and selections from) banned Czech poets. Whatever Kunze touches on, whether cautiously scouted or sharply attacked, takes vivid shape, but what he doesn't attempt to convey--the life of the average, over-21 East German citizen--constitutes a tangible, looming vacuum. One cannot fault this writer for darting among the various subjects that disturb him, but one can feel disappointed that what is admittedly a publishing event is not also a truly engrossing, coherent reading experience.

Pub Date: April 26, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION