In Germany, “Ostalgie,” or nostalgia for the east, is less and less fashionable, and literary interests have turned to the young generation that has matured in the 15 years since the Berlin Wall fell. Christa Wolf is no longer considered important. But she is still alive and writing, and her short new novel, “In the Flesh” (David R. Godine/Verba Mundi, 144 pages, $24.95) is in many ways superb. It says something about the conditions of so-called World Literature, though, that a writer might cease to be interesting when her home country ceases to be interested in her.

“In the Flesh” is specifically concerned with the process of giving up on political beliefs, such as Ms. Wolf’s hope for a legitimately socialist East Germany. It is a novel about illness, in which a narrator, a writer like Ms. Wolf, lies in a hospital bed. Her body simultaneously produces and fights stomach abscesses, which she is not likely to survive.

In a 1991 lecture on “Cancer and Society,” Ms. Wolf set out to contradict Susan Sontag’s famous thesis, from “Illness as Metaphor,” that cancer, like tuberculosis in the 19th century, assumes amorphous social connotations. (For example, cancer might be considered a byproduct of repressed rage, or bourgeois inertia.) Sontag believed these connotations were pernicious. But Ms. Wolf is interested in treating “the whole person.”

She remembers being very ill, when she was helped by the “web of associations” and “field of expectation” aroused by Goethe’s poems. “Everything depends on what in a culture is said and believed to be ‘real’ and in agreement with social convention.” As a political creature, Ms. Wolf is like the patient who wants to know as much medicine as her doctor. Her allegory of pathology and politics saturates “In the Flesh.”

Yet Ms. Wolf has always written in a stream of consciousness, not impressionistic but philosophically searching. Her stories contain mental blinds and double blinds, dreams within doubts within conversations. It is not hard to read. She populates “In the Flesh” with nurses and doctors, discrete personalities whom she engages like any novelist. And because her allegory is not simple, she is happy to leave the reader with an aggregate idea rather than a specific point.

Sometimes Ms. Wolf feels a fearful loyalty to her illness, and the state. But when she writes that “you just can’t simply give up in midstream because things aren’t precious any longer,” she seems to feel that recovery, or Westernization, is the only honorable option, even if life will be less rich than before the illness.

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If the Germans prefer to ask some questions about oppression obliquely, other writers may be more free. Roberto Bolano was one of the most respected Chilean writers when he died of liver failure in 2003, and “Distant Star” (New Directions, 166 pages, $14.95) is only his second novel to be translated into English.

Bolano’s imagination is more criminal than Ms. Wolf’s, but it is also more innocent. When he died he was planning to edit his thousand-page novel, called “2666,” about the unsolved murders of 300 Mexican women. “Distant Star” is a much smaller novel, in which only several dozen women, few of whom are named, are murdered.

The villain is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, whom the narrator meets in a pre-Pinochet poetry workshops – “in Chile all poetic acts spelt disaster,” a character later remarks. When the coup comes, Ruiz-Tagle, shown to be an air force pilot, launches a “New Chilean Poetry” in the sky: He is a skywriter. Nominally loyal to the regime, he breaks with it in a final display that is obscured by cloud. “Death is cleansing,” he writes, “Death is my heart / Take my heart.”

Ruiz-Tagle later speaks of “simple people, autodidacts taking on the world,” and the narrator reads an essay of his that argues “that literature should be written by non-literary people, just as politics should be and indeed was being taken over by nonpoliticians.” He regards this as the “ultimate joke” and “deadly serious.”

Bolano’s writing is macabre without being grotesque; his imagery dark but also shining. As poetry is a trope of doom in “Distant Star,” Bolano’s poetic asides betray an undertow of grief so insistent as to be almost funny. “We hardly ever had two dimes to rub together (it seems so odd to be writing the word dime. I can see it shining like an eye in the night); Ruiz-Tagle was never short of money.”

Yet Bolano’s sense of humor is somewhat alien, especially as it plays on the more playful aspects of dictatorship, and he impishly complicates the magical noir style by making gestures toward the taboo. If “2666” is ever published in English, it could not be more scary than “Distant Star,” and could be only slightly more complicated.