Berlin Cantata
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A city that has lost one of its limbs and is receiving a miraculous gift, a little bump under the flesh, where the limb is just beginning to grow back. Thus does the American girl in Jeffrey Lewis’s remarkable polyphonic novel describe Berlin and the “remnant Jews, secret GDR Jews...Soviet Jews...Jews who'd fled and come back with the victors, Jews who were lost mandarins now, Jews who'd believed in the universality of man and maybe still did” whom she finds at a Day of Atonement gathering in the eastern part of the city in a year soon after the Wall fell. Berlin Cantata deploys thirteen voices to tell a story not only of atonement, but of discovery, loss, identity, intrigue, mystery, insanity, sadomasochism and lies. At its centre is a country house owned successively by Jews, Nazis and Communists. In the country house, the American girl seeks her hidden past. In the girl, a local reporter seeks redemption. In the reporter, a false hero of the past seeks exposure. In the false hero, the American girl seeks a guide. And so it goes, a round of conspiracy and desire. Even as he describes his native city, the false hero describes the characters of Berlin Cantata: “We dined on wreckage. We were not afraid to beg. We continued our long tradition of believing either in nothing or too much.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thirteen narrators comprise the choir of Lewis's newest (after Meritocracy: A Love Story), a story of a city and its inhabitants seeking atonement for the past. A chain of events is set into motion when Holly, a Jewish American woman, travels to Berlin soon after the fall of the Wall to reclaim the house from which her parents were expelled during the Holocaust. In the decades since her parents lost the property, both Nazis and Communists owned the house, and Holly finds it currently occupied by the remaining members of the "old East German Writers Union." The quest to repossess the home, and thus gain closure for the horrors inflicted on her parents, is far more complex than she expected. Whilst in Berlin (which one narrator describes as "a hothouse, that had grown under the Cold War's searchlights exotic flowers of every inappropriate variety"), she meets a fraudulent war hero and a local journalist, both of whom, in their respective narratives, reveal or withhold secrets that inform the relationships between them. Linked by a history of shifting loyalties and deceit, the narrator's stories are filled with the agony of loss and the desperate search for identity. By giving voice to his characters, Lewis navigates their tales with compassion and fully explores the complications of living in a city haunted by its violent past.
