This book was one of three novels to be read and discussed on a course called The European city in contemporary literature.
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This fictional memoir of a girl from Mexico living in Berlin is completely engaging. I’ve never been to Berlin, but I feel like I’ve come to know it through this book. I’d probably have derived even more pleasure from it had I had a map of Berlin open while I read, but it stands on its own anyway.
The story itself is interesting, and the author brings the characters (and all of the cast really are characters) alive. The writing is beautiful, and more than once I found myself thinking: “Why has it never occurred to me to express my thoughts like this?”
Beautiful and thought-provoking is how I’d describe the prose. For instance, I really like this:
“Spaces cling to their pasts, he said, and sometimes the present finds a way of accommodating this past, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
That just seems to me to be very provocative, in a good way. It’s a very wistful way of portraying the city as a living entity, and although I’ve not been to this city, I can relate this sentiment to places I’ve known in London.
Definitely a book to curl up with.
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