The stark melancholy of its wintry cover, the complex city I revisited through its pages and the ‘speak-memory’ concept that guides the narrative were all signals that I should have loved Gail Jones’ latest novel, A Guide to Berlin. Other reviewers warmed to the book in ways I didn’t—so, I keep going back to it and asking myself, what have I missed?
The book’s cover features a photo of a snow-frosted cemetery and shows the severity of weather Jones experienced when she visited Berlin for a month in March 2013. In January 2014, she returned to the city on a 12-month writing fellowship and stayed in an apartment just a few blocks from where Vladimir Nabokov lived for five years with his wife Vera and baby son Dimitri. The family fled the city due to the rise of Nazism and headed first to France and then to America where he wrote Lolita, his most famous novel.
A Guide to Berlin is named for a short story Nabokov wrote while he lived in Berlin.
In Jones’s ‘guide’ the narrator is a 26-year-old Australian woman called Cass who has come to Berlin in the winter of 2013 to write. Cass is photographing the house in the suburb of Nestorstrasse Nabokov lived in during the 1930s when she gets invited to join a group where each member narrates their life story using Nabokov’s Speak, Memory as a prompt.
The group includes Victor from New York, Marco and Gino from Rome and Yukio and Mitsuko from Tokyo. Each of their stories has a distinct flavour and we see how history has shaped their lives and personalities. Marco’s grandparents died in Nazi camps, Gino’s father died when a terrorist bomb exploded in Bologna’s central railway station, and Cass’ ‘speak-memory’ skirts her brother’s death in a cyclone.
It was the young Japanese couple’s reminiscences that absorbed me most. Yukio is hikikomori—that is, a young person (usually male) who lives withdrawn from the world in his bedroom. Mitsuko is a ‘rental sister’ who dresses as a Goth Lolita. She is hired by Yukio’s parents in a desperate effort to get their son to come out of his room.
It works—and they become lovers.
When Mitsuko finds Nabokov’s Lolita in a second-hand bookshop she is incredulous that Lolita wasn’t Japanese but had ‘derived from a Russian man living in America’.
Mitsuko’s father is the last in thirteen generations of potters and her earliest memory is of a pot ‘turning on the wheel and her father’s hands creating a shape’.
Her ‘speak-memory’ includes the wonderfully redolent and earthy understanding of time and history she had in childhood.
‘As a child I believed that history was a kind of smell, the scent of baking clay—musty and biscuity. Or of the sunshine drying seawater on human skin. I had no specific image of the past, because the pots of the eighteenth century look like the pots of the twenty-first century, but I somehow knew that this was it, that something as immaterial as a smell might carry time itself, that the dusty past was inside us, that the earth was inside us.’
‘Radiance splintering’
Cass is the last member of the group to tell her story and by this time she and Marco are lovers. Their interactions cemented my growing uneasiness with the book. Before I talk further about my difficulties, I should note that the novel contains some truly elegant writing and perceptive descriptions.
Here are a few:
- ‘The blue violet of shadows had lightened and there was a radiance splintering across the wall. When (Cass) turned she saw it: the first snowfall since she had arrived.’
- ‘The doctor, a turtle-faced man with waxy skin …’
- ‘The plates of ice on the Spree, uneven and jagged, resembled a spray of shattered glass after a wartime bombing. There must have been old people, she thought, gazing through the grime of an S-Bahn window, who looked down at the river and canals and recalled something blasted and asunder, piles of bricks, lives scattered and a windowless episode in their childhoods.’
On the down-side, there were more than a few moments during my first and subsequent readings that sentences jarred and made me concerned about the book’s editing.
- After Cass sees Marco have a fit in a gallery he ‘seemed to assume that Cass had been repulsed when actually his distress and disturbance intensified her interest’. (Really?)
- Cass thinks of the Speak, Memory group and ‘how unlikely a coalition they were, how misfitted and intimately haphazard’. (Misfitted? Intimately haphazard?)
- Responding to Marco, Cass ‘suppressed an instinct of iconic recoil’ and was ‘reluctant to part with … the skill of his embrace’. (Iconic recoil? Skilled embrace?)
- ‘Cass did not know how to respond to Marco’s tale of ancient disaster. She thought of no witty comment, laced with seductive wit.’ (witty wit?)
- Mitsuko ‘kissed Cass thrice’. (Not just three times?)
Why is the language so stilted? Why do the characters speak like they’re in a tutorial more often than seems warranted? Why are Cass’s thoughts, at times, so oddly expressed and overwrought?
It may be that Jones’s novel perfectly emulates (or parodies?) the language Nabokov employed in his short story. It may also be that the mannered style and hot-housed take on human experience she has chosen for this work just isn’t my cup of tea.
A Guide to Berlin is undoubtedly a considerable achievement but the book’s final stages strained credibility. That these dilettantes would do what they did at this point seemed highly unlikely to me. If these chapters were meant to be the manifestation of and/or conclusion to some fictional game rather than reality (for example, the writing that Cass was supposed to have gone to Berlin to do, but actually never seems to be doing) then the signals weren’t anywhere near clear enough for me. Or perhaps it was all a dream—as the ‘real’ Berlin is the Berlin of Spring and in winter it is ‘truly haunted’?
I really enjoyed Jones’s Five Bells and so I gave A Guide to Berlin a good chance to woo me—but I found too many parts of the book ruffled my feathers or left me cold and confused. I do plan to read Nabokov’s story of the same title to see what literary allusions and fillips I might have missed, and because it’s meant to be quite beautiful.
My recommendation is that you balance what I’ve said here with other reviews—as most are positive and glowing. Then, if you do decide to read A Guide to Berlin, let me know if, and how, it lured you through its U-Bahns and speak-memories. It may be that I’m the only reader who felt frozen out by this ‘guide’; wandering the icy terrain of its narrative, bewildered and somewhat lost.
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