ericmacknight@bookrastinating.com reviewed Cassandra by Christa Wolf
Fascinating
5 stars
The short novel is followed by four essays/journals that chronicle her writing of the novel, including a trip to Greece. Read the essays first, then the novel. Wolf's re-imagining of Cassandra and her story is wonderful, but so are the glimpses of life in East Germany in the early 1980s, when Wolf and her friends were convinced that the world would be engulfed in a nuclear war within three or four years. The essays are sprinkled with prescient passages like this:
"To call what was true, true, and what was untrue, false: That was asking so little (I thought) . . . . Then I understood: . . . we were defending everything that we no longer had. And the more it faded, the more real we had to say it was."
