Pavel's Letters
  • Published: 1 November 2002
  • ISBN: 9781860466298
  • Imprint: Harvill Press
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $32.99

Pavel's Letters

Formats & editions
EBook
31 Oct 2011
Tr. Paperback
1 Nov 2002
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'A subtle and tender book about remembering... Maron turns this story of the great pains as well as the small pleasures of everyday life before, during and after the Second World War into a tale of hope against hope' - Ralf Dahrendorf.

Teasing her family's past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany's greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.

Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, Monika Maron grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents, she questions her mother, whose selective memory throws up obstacles to Maron's understanding of her grandparents' horrifying denouement in Polish exile.

Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. In telling her family's powerful and heroic story, she has written a memoir that has the force of a great novel and also stands both as an elaborate metaphor for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.
  • Published: 1 November 2002
  • ISBN: 9781860466298
  • Imprint: Harvill Press
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Monika Maron

Monika Maron was born in Berlin in 1941. She grew up in East Germany and left for the West in 1988. The author of the novels Silent Close No.6, Flight of Ashes, Animal Triste and The Defectors, she now lives in Berlin once again.

Praise for Pavel's Letters

This is the deeply piercing story, both personal and political, of a generation. It is hard to imagine it can be surpassed

Tilman Krause, Die Welt

Monika Maron makes other people's memories her own. She does so without moral outrage, telling the story straightforwardly, unsentimentally, not trying to show off her skill. The greatness of this book lies in this discretion: and Pavel's Letters is a great book

Rolf Schneider

A raw...subtle and moving book

Independent

Pavel's Letters has a particularly haunting quality

Times Literary Supplement

This writer has more reason than most to publish a memoir

Independent on Sunday
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