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    Here in Berlin: A Novel
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    Here in Berlin: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Here in Berlin: A Novel
    Ebook186 pages2 hours

    Here in Berlin: A Novel

    By Cristina García

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
    A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

    "Here in Berlin is one of the most interesting new works of fiction I've read . . . The voices are remarkably distinct, and even with their linguistic mannerisms . . . mark them out as separate people . . . [This novel] is simply very, very good." —The New York Times Book Review

    Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin—its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina García brings the people of this famed city to life, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing.

    An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character—vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace.

    A meditation on war and mystery, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future.

    "Garcia’s new novel is ingeniously structured, veering from poignant to shocking . . . Here in Berlin has echoes of W.G. Sebald, but its vivid, surprising images of wartime Berlin are Garcia’s own." —BBC Culture, 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateOct 1, 2017
    ISBN9781619029705
    Unavailable
    Here in Berlin: A Novel
    Author

    Cristina García

    Cristina García is the author of eight novels including Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Here in Berlin, and Vanishing Maps. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fifteen languages. She has taught at universities nationwide and is currently Resident Playwright at Central Works Theater in Berkeley. Visit her website at CristinaGarciaNovelist.com. 

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    Reviews for Here in Berlin

    4/5

    25 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      3.5 A unknown, unnamed visitor arrive in Berlin, and sets off to discover exactly what this city has gone through and become. It is, 2013 and as she travels she talks to many different people, discovering their stories, writing them down. She calls them by different titles such as nurse, just putting their real names in small print shove the titles. Many of those she talks to had different roles during WWII, and some are Cubans who moved here during that time.These are vignettes, snapshots of the people who make up this city. They come from all walks of life, and many of their roles during the war are ones I had never heard about before. In the vignette simply called Preachers, a young girl working as a linguistic anthropologist, fluent in seven languages, is sent by the Nazis to the American South to study the oratory skills of the Black preachers. The young Jewish woman who was hidden in a tomb for several days, until her husband could get them passage to England. Many other stories, so many, all so very interesting seeing the city through these snapshots. History's long shadow cast over a burgeoning city that has changed much. Uncovered stories and unforgotten memories, very well done. I believe the visitor is a stand in for us, the readers and the thing she sees and thinks are inserted between the vignettes.
    • 3/5
      I really liked the concept of this book with its myriad vignettes, and many of them were very compelling. But I think that also hurt the book--with the sheer quantity of stories being told here, they were frequently not explored fully enough (for my preference at least). The audio would have benefited from multiple readers as well. Its sole reader, Joan Walker, was good, but didn't offer enough variety for the amount of accounts within this short book.
    • 4/5
      I'm a little in love with Berlin. It's this modern, bustling, multi-cultural city, festooned with building cranes that is also haunted by history in a way no other city is. It's full of art and grime and people getting on with their days. You can grab a döner, see an exhibition of pretty much any kind of art you like, encounter a gathering of Stolpersteine in front of a building you've passed a dozen times unaware, browse in an English-language bookshop and catch a train going anywhere in Europe all in the same afternoon. And so it happens that I will buy pretty much any book with Berlin in the title. In Here in Berlin a middle-aged Cuban woman goes to Berlin. She's looking for a new beginning, but finds herself lonely and without focus in this city she's unfamiliar with. But as she becomes more fluent in German, she begins talking to people, usually older people, usually living in nursing homes, about their pasts. And in short chapters, they tell their stories. So there are former Nazis and former Stasi agents justifying their pasts, women remembering their fear of the Russians, Cubans who fought for the Nazis on behalf of General Franco and who stayed behind after the war, circus performers and musicians, Stalinists and lesbians. It's an interesting format that is hampered only by its reliance on the voices of the elderly so that the novel feels more like an elegy for a disappeared city than a reflection of Berlin today.