YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: LITERATURE: FRENCH

FRENCH: Canada. The old dominated, and the new struggled to break through in 1996 in French-Canadian literature. Marie-Claire Blais, whose high-angst Gothic style had shaped a generation of writers, won the country's top fiction prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, for her 1995 novel Soifs. Meanwhile, younger writers like Louis Hamelin tried to break through. His adventure novel Le Soleil des gouffres was set in Quebec and Mexico and featured the evildoings of a cult. Old political issues were among the dominant themes of the year. After the 1995 referendum on independence, Quebeckers had a choice among a host of analyses, some discussing why both sides lost. Jose Legault continued to be the main spokeswoman for Quebec nationalists with her collection Les Nouveaux Dmons: chroniques et analyses politiques, while historian Jacques Lacoursire's Historie populaire du Qubec gave French Canadians an accessible window to their past. Fiction from immigrant writers continued to supply the most startling energy on the Quebec literary scene. Dany Laferrire, in his novel Pays sans chapeau, described the difficult journey back to his native Haiti. Brazilian-born Sergio Kokis, in Errances, combined political intrigue, male adventure, and meditations on the state and the artist and showed in the process how a skilled immigrant writer can bypass the shopworn theme of "coming to the new land." Nancy Huston, who was born in Calgary, Alta., and in 1996 lived in Paris, had a literary and popular success with her novel Instruments des tnbres. Her book combined a tale set in pre-Revolutionary France with the story of a modern woman's exploration in America. Other French-Canadian writers scored popular hits with largely female audiences: Marie Laberge with Annabelle and Chrystine Brouillet with C'est pour mieux t'aimer, mon enfant. Poets can sometimes face a thankless task when it comes to reaching an audience, though Jos Acquelin with his Traverse du dsert managed to create a readership. At the end of 1996, French-Canadian letters lost Gaston Miron--poet, cultural agitator, and harmonica player. (See OBITUARIES.) (DAVID HOMEL) GERMANIC Controversy continued to mark the German literary landscape during the past year. Karl Corino, a literary editor at Hessischer Rundfunk, published an article in the newspaper Die Zeit in October in which he questioned the authenticity of Stephan Hermlin's autobiography. Hermlin, a prominent figure in the literature and politics of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), had achieved mythic status as an antifascist freedom fighter. The article served as a prelude to Corino's book about Hermlin. The charged atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal involved in the revelations about the involvement of writers such as Christa Wolf, Heiner Mller, and Sascha Anderson in the Stasi (the East German state security police) had abated by 1996. Nonetheless, the relationship between writers and the Stasi was the focus of Joachim Walther's Sicherungsbereich Literatur. The work provided an overview of the cultural and political function of the Stasi, its structure and history, the methods deployed, the role of collaborators, and other matters. Walther's contribution to the debate lent insight into the role of culture and its producers in the paranoid security system of the former GDR. Heiner Mller's Germania 3: Gespenster am Toten Mann was published and performed posthumously. It completed the playwright's Germania Tod in Berlin (1956-71) with the death of the GDR in a demonstration of the ways in which German history was haunted by the likes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Mller's piece showcased the role played by Bertolt Brecht, the three mourning women involved with him, and the directors of the Berliner Ensemble in the management of East German cultural history. In Medea: Stimmen, a novel about the relationship between a woman, the reigning powers, and society, Christa Wolf returned to Greek mythology to make allegorical points about the German present. Much as she had in Kassandra, Wolf imagined an alternative history, a specifically female version of events that had shaped Western thought. Klaus Schlesinger, in his well-received novel Die Sache mit Randow, narrated the events of one day on a particular street six years after the end of World War II. From the perspective of the post-1989 period, the narrator Thomale looked back on the efforts of the young criminal Randow (Ambach), known as the Al Capone of Berlin, to escape. In an effort to repress his own complicity in Randow's fate, the narrator revisited the lives of his friends and neighbours in Dunckerstrasse. In Schlesinger's colloquial, readable prose, the novel masterfully evoked an identity specific to a given street in everyday East Berlin before the building of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall also played a role in Monika Maron's Animal triste, a novel about an East Berlin woman's obsessive love, memory, and forgetting. The narrator, a paleontologist, recounted through repressed and replayed memories her affair with a West German researcher and its tragic end. The differences between East and West informed the couple's relationship, and the narrator looked back with bitter amazement at the wall that sealed her off. In precise and unflinching prose, Maron created a heroine whose life revolved around a love so passionate that it consumed her completely. Peter Hrtling produced the compelling Knstlerroman, Schumanns Schatten, which narrated the final two years of the composer's syphilitic sufferings in chapters alternating with formative events from his youth, his passion for literature and music, and his love for Clara. Hrtling relies on many sources, including the diary of a doctor who treated Schumann and kept a record of his behaviour during the composer's physical and mental deterioration. Among publications in poetry was Sarah Kirsch's Bodenlos. The winner of the Bchner-Preis, Kirsch treated the familiar theme of the relationship between nature and the poet in an unornamented language of uncanny precision, concision, and longing. Bert Papenfuss-Gorek let his highly political poems unfold in the volume Berliner Zapfenstreich: Schnelle Eingreifsgesnge. His virtuosity included diction ranging from the colloquial to the mildly obscene, all signed with his critical rage and wit. The publication of Irgendwo: noch einmal mcht ich sehn, edited by Ines Geipel, marked the first substantial volume dedicated to the work of Inge Mller. The book collected her poetry, prose, and diary entries and included commentary about the work. Wolfgang Koeppen died in 1996. He was among the first to portray in modernist prose the sinister continuities between the fascist past and the "democratic" postwar present of the Federal Republic of Germany. (PATRICIA A. SIMPSON)