SOURCE: “Morning Becomes Radioactive,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 4, 1989, pp. 3, 16.

In the following review, Eder offers a positive assessment of Accident.

It is three years since the nuclear catastrophe at the Chernobyl power station in the Ukraine, and already, for most of us, it has gone from a universal portent to an affair conveniently left to worry specialists. Our memory's half-life is so much shorter than strontium's.

Christa Wolf, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary German literature, forbids us to forget. That is all very well; the half-life of forbidding is the shortest of all. Except that Wolf is a great artist, and her brief and shining Accident shifts her voice into our throats. It will be we who forbid.

Accident: A Day's News is, in form, precisely that. The day is a bright day in April, 1986; the place is a village in the...