Monika Maron

Pavel's Letters has a particularly haunting quality

This writer has more reason than most to publish a memoir

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

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

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.

Pavel's Letters

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Monika Maron

Praise for Pavel's Letters

A raw...subtle and moving book

Pavel's Letters has a particularly haunting quality

This writer has more reason than most to publish a memoir

A raw...subtle and moving book

Pavel's Letters has a particularly haunting quality

This writer has more reason than most to publish a memoir

A raw...subtle and moving book

Pavel's Letters has a particularly haunting quality

This writer has more reason than most to publish a memoir

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