Patricia Le Roy

If you liked the non-fiction book "Stasiland" and/or the film, "The Lives of Others", you should definitely give this excellent novel a try.

Its starting point is the death of a French woman, Anne, who was (seemingly) happily married to Matthias, an East German - a marriage that took place some years before the collapse of the DDR. But Anne appears to have taken a number of secrets to her grave. Several years later, Matthias finally decides to visit her family in Provence, looking for answers. Neither he nor Anne’s family fully understand why she made the choices that she did - and it is only when they put the different pieces of the jigsaw together that the truth emerges.

Characters speak in the first person, with the author switching at regular intervals from one to another, yet managing to give each of them a distinctive voice. In that respect, the novel reminded me somewhat of a number of recent stage plays based on factual events where characters come to the front of the stage and attempt to explain themselves (e.g. much of David Hare’s recent work and Michael Frayn’s “Democracy” – also partly about the DDR). This helps to give the novel something of a documentary feel - which is entirely appropriate, since much of what is depicted is based on fact (even if the characters are fictional).

Overall, I thought this was a superb literary/psychological novel. For a longer review which explains in more detail why I liked it - and also includes some further musings on the DDR, the Stasi, publishers and, rather more bizarrely, zombies - see: http://www.paulsamael.com/blog/the-judas-tree

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This novel is about the marriage in the mid 1980s between a young French music student Anne and an older East German cello player Matthias. Their genuine love (despite regular summer visits back home in the south of France, Anne stays in Leipzig to be with him) is undermined and destroyed by the Stasi as their surveillance of citizens through the use of informers (they had files on nearly half the adult population) undermines the trust between them as a couple and between them as individuals and other people. It shows the corrosive effect of generally non-violent but bureaucratic totalitarianism on ordinary human relationships. Moving.… (plus d'informations)