SOURCE: Mahlendorf, Ursula R. Review of Die Überläuferin, by Monika Maron. World Literature Today 61, no. 4 (autumn 1987): 619.

In the following review, Mahlendorf offers a positive assessment of Die Überläuferin, noting that the novel is “eminently worth reading.”

Even with her first narrative and dramatic works, the East German author Monika Maron established a reputation for excellence. Her texts are “admirably exact, imaginative, replete with anguished imagery, rhythmically and stylistically pure,” wrote Reinhard Kill in the Rheinische Post on 21 November 1983. Her second novel, Die Überläuferin (The Deserter), lives up to Maron's early promise in every way. Though her first novel, Flugasche, was a realistic critical portrayal of the GDR workaday world and particularly its bureaucracy, her second explores the private life of a sensitive intellectual woman, the historian Rosalind Polkowski, and the thinking of her alter ego, the rebellious anarchist, housewife, and poet Martha Mantel. In many...