Similar to—but far more involving than—Gunter Grass' The Meeting at Telgte, Wolf's novella [No Place on Earth] posits an imaginary colloquy between two German literary figures of the past: the great sensitive, Henrich von Kleist, shown soon after his burning of the manuscript for Robert Guiscard; and the poet Karoline von Günderrode…. Each portrait is vivid and poetic of itself…. And, together, their conversation drills through recklessness of thought, personal loves/hatreds (such as Kleist's for Goethe), and philosophy (Günderrode's anguished feminism) … before arriving at aphorism: "From what she has observed, she says, the ambition of gifted people is intensified by inauspicious circumstances, the ambition of the untalented by their distorted self-esteem." Historical, hypothetical, but marvelously intense: a fascinating short novel by one of Europe's most consistently haunting novelists….

A review of "No Place on Earth," in Kirkus Reviews (copyright © 1982 The Kirkus Service, Inc...