I was interested to read more about ordinary people from the East and their experiences. He swears he chipped it off himself, lol. I even have an authentic piece of the wall a college friend brought me from his trip to Germany in the summer of 1990. It was especially interesting to me because I remember watching all the events leading to the fall of the GDR unfold. I mostly enjoyed this look at East Germany in the decade after the wall came down. The misgivings about the style are my own. So if this review seems disjointed in its explanation, let me lay any confusion to rest: Funder's writing is brilliant and beautiful, and paints her story across the canvas. Often I felt as if the author relied simply upon 'what you know' about East Berlin to shorthand the narrative, and yet the world of the Stasi's GDR surrounded me as I read and her characters lept off the page.

Certainly the book wasn't long on context. It's the last point that I expected to bother me as I finished the book. The story felt intellectually light in some places, and yet full of the humanity of her subjects. On more than one occasion, I found the lack of contextual depth noticeable only to realize five minutes later that Funder had pulled me along with her gentle narratives. Instead, she spends her time fluttering from citizen to Stassi to citizen, at each stop painting portraits of a life stuck in a particular time.Įven as I try to capture her narrative style and stylings, I find it difficult. She offers little historical insight or weighty dissections of how East Berlin came to be. The book, and the stories of the people she meets as she pieces together life in East Berlin during the time of The Wall, is gorgeous and flawed (in the best way).įunder's story paints a picture of daily life in East Berlin under the brutal watch of the Stasi, the sector's secret police. I realize that's hardly a ringing endorsement for first-person stories, and yet Anna Funder has managed to do exactly the opposite with Stasiland. Done poorly, it's a narcissistic writer's tool that reads about as well as a monkey uses a hammer. It's a troublesome form, first person, because quite often the narrative gets in the way of the story. My friend Aleks and I are each writing non-fiction stories that involve some form of first-person narrative.

Anna funder