YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: LITERATURE: FRENCH

FRENCH: Canada. In French Canada 1995 was marked by the works of women writers who reached new heights in their careers. Rachel Leclerc's novel Noces de sable clearly illustrated this phenomenon. The novel was set in a Gaspesian fishing village in historic lower Canada, in which the conflict between a French-Canadian and a British merchant crystallized in the marriage of a worker to his employer's daughter. The tale was written in a poetic prose far removed from a realistic style. With La Dmarche du crabe, Monique LaRue combined high formal standards with the desire to re-create the Qubcois past. The protagonist, a dentist, embodies the generation that grew up in the 1960s; he was filled with ideals but found that his life as a middle-aged man was barren. L'Ingratitude was the third book published by Ying Chen, a young writer of Chinese background. Considered for France's Prix Fmina, the novel placed the mingled love and hatred a young woman feels for her mother in a Chinese cultural frame. After her own death, the narrator retraces the major events of her life as she witnesses the rituals of her funeral. The internationally known author Marie-Claire Blais published Soifs, in which AIDS, racism, capital punishment, and other modern themes formed an impressive picture that flowed for 300 pages without a single paragraph break. Mysticism continued to inspire French-Canadian writers. Yolande Villemaire's Le Dieu dansant arose from a vision the author allegedly experienced when visiting India. It was a convincing portrait of that country during the 11th century, as much for its description of social institutions as for its handling of personal spiritual experience. Serge-Patrice Thibodeau offered, in the form of the long poem Le Quatuor de l'errance, an account of an actual initiation journey that took him from New Delhi to Jerusalem via the countries of Nepal, Pakistan, and Iran. It should also be mentioned that many major Quebec writers published during 1995. These included Michel Tremblay, Anne Hbert, Andr Major, Nicole Brossard, and Madeleine Gagnon. (PATRICK NICOL) GERMANIC Nothing in German literature received more publicity in 1995 than the novel Ein weites Feld by Gnter Grass. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) Although he was by no means the only person to denounce the work, critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki's ripping up the book on national television incurred the ire of the author and of many others. In the novel, which dealt with the events of 1989-91, Grass attempted to forge a link across the events of a century by comparing the reunification of modern Germany with Bismarck's unification of the country in 1871. Grass made his protagonist (Theo Wuttke) a spiritual descendant of the 19th-century author Theodor Fontane and an employee of Treuhand, the controversial agency established to privatize the economy of the former German Democratic Republic. The author was unsparing in his attack on what he saw as the forced incorporation of the GDR into the Federal Republic. Tabu I, by the poet and essayist Peter Rhmkorf, was a novel-style journal of 1989-91. Rhmkorf welded notes, essays on poetics, poems, polemics, and diverse articles into an entertaining text that gave an ironic account of the period while keeping the larger world context in view through television. Similar to Grass, he gathered up the events of 1989-91 and all those who spoke and acted in those days into a gay, apocalyptic cavalcade that, despite the diary form, told less about the author than it did about the sudden and startling end of the old Federal Republic. Peter Wawerzinek recounted the end of the GDR in his novel Mein Babylon. Here also, autobiographical minutiae were in the foreground as the author related the comical progress of the protagonist as art student, cemetery gardener, cabinetmaker's apprentice, chauffeur, and writer and as he looked at everyday life in East Berlin's artists' quarter. In his riotous and willful novel Abschied von den Feinden, the romancer Reinhard Jirgl told an East-West story of a very special type: a woman has been murdered and her body left in a field. Seeking to clear up the murder are two brothers, one from the East, the other having immigrated years earlier to the West, both of whom were in love with the woman. The story develops into a tragedy involving the Stasi (the East German secret police), psychiatric treatments, and the craft of writing. Christoph Ransmayr's Morbus Kitahara speculated as to the consequences for Germany after World War II had U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman listened to those who wanted to reduce Germany to a preindustrial condition by transforming it into a pastoral country of sheepherders and goatherds. In a ravaged landscape of iron and mud, Ransmayr showed three people struggling to survive in a nightmare worthy of Kafka. Suspenseful and funny at once, Langer Samstag by Burkhard Spinnen told of a lawyer who meets a woman in a supermarket, goes with her to a soccer game, and then goes to bed with her. It told of an average life in the provinces, but it was a virtuoso work full of humour and irony. Of equal note was the picaresque novel Unbekannt verzogen by Michael Schulte, whose hero is always moving from one city to the next and from one continent to another. Along the way the radical flaneur dreams up bizarre tales of faith healers, thieving hoteliers, and opera divas, all told in a sharp and lively manner. The most noteworthy lyrical work of the year was Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Kiosk, his first volume of poetry in a good while. Laconic, fractured, and ironic in style, the work was in the tradition of the late poetry of Gottfried Benn, the state of the world being depicted with a cheerful melancholy. Yet behind the mature equanimity of the gracile and minimalist Enzensberger lurked the trenchant poet who, armed with pointed aphorisms, was never afraid to take on contemporary issues--only no longer in an instructional way, as he had in the 1960s. Other works of poetry included Raoul Schrott's Hotels and Barbara Khler's second book, Blue Box: Gedichten. With Thomas Mann's Tagebcher, 1953-1955, Inge Jens completed the 10-volume project begun more than 15 years earlier by the Thomas Mann biographer Peter de Mendelssohn. The private life and sorrows of Mann in the years before his death, his doubts that he had created a significant and lasting work, and the secret passions of the "magician" could now be read by interested laypersons and experts alike. Equally important were the journal entries of the novelist Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten, culled from his bequest. In this work, like nowhere else, the everyday life of a Jew in Hitler's Third Reich was meticulously documented. It supplemented Klemperer's 1947 work LTI; Notizbuch eines Philologen, in which he analyzed the language of the National Socialists. Playwright Heiner Mller died on December 30. (See OBITUARIES.) (DANIEL A. HAUFLER)