Unter den Linden, by Christa Wolf, who wrote Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968), is subtitled "Three Improbable Tales", and the subject-matter is certainly out of the ordinary. In the title story, a young woman relives, in a dream, an unhappy affair; in the second, an unusually gifted cat, a descendant of Hoffmann's Kater Murr, eavesdrops—and sceptically comments—on his master dreaming of physical and spiritual happiness; and the third is a report by a volunteer who undergoes a sex change in the course of testing the drug "Petersein Masculinum 199", but ultimately resorts to an injection of the antidote in order to revert to being a woman.

The time and place of these stories ranges from Berlin with its persistent echoes of the past to the year 1992, but there are dominant common features: each has a questing and questioning first-person narrator, a preoccupation with speculation and dream-worlds, and a...