SOURCE: A review of Sommerstück, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn, 1989, p. 674.

In the following review, Blomster offers a mixed assessment of Sommerstück.

Sommerstück, a loosely woven recollection of an idyllic Mecklenburg summer, is Christa Wolf's 1987 reworking of sketches made in 1982 and 1983; they are in part a by-product of Kein ort. Nirgends (see WLT 53:4, p. 671), which she wrote several years earlier. Although the author concludes her new work with the customary disclaimer about the actuality of persons and events depicted, there is much here that invites autobiographical decoding. Indeed, the book is clearly a Künstlernovelle, in which the central figure is a no-longer-young writer (Wolf turned sixty in April) who experiences a crisis in her relationship to the word. “Unbefangenheit,” that cherished naïveté which Thomas Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach sought to regain in 1911, is no longer hers. She is caught up in...