SOURCE: “A Woman-Centered Politics of Peace,” in Belles Lettres, Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 61–62.

In the following review, Manos offers a favorable assessment of What Remains and The Author's Dimension.

When I first read The Quest for Christa T., I knew that Christa Wolf was presenting a notion of the self that I could identify with as a woman, that underscored the forces, within as well as without, that combine so effortlessly to discount our individual quests for self-fulfillment. Wolf assigns her narrator in Christa T. a seemingly impossible task: to return her dead friend to a living presence by reconsidering memories of Christa T. and scrutinizing their correspondence over the years. The narrator discovers, in the process of completing her quest, that she is actually validating her own being. What struck me even more profoundly was another quest underway in the novel: Wolf's own, as author, to probe...