The Undercurrents
A Story of Berlin
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
Humane, thought provoking, and moving, this hybrid literary portrait of a place makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities, and our histories.
The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.
When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell—a British-American art critic, adrift in her midforties—becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art critic Bell (The Artist's House) mesmerizes with this intimate, curious memoir of Berlin, where she's lived for two decades since arriving as a student in 2001. Soon after Bell and her family found a new home in 2014 on the Landwehr Canal, the once glorious, now decaying 19th-century apartment (and its frequent leaks) became a symbol of her own crumbling marriage: "Well-kept secrets rose up.... Damp bruises of distrust and neglect became suddenly visible. Welled resentments burst their banks." Perpetually fascinated by the city's architecture, she fixated on learning more about the mechanics and history of the building, consulting a feng shui master, city archives, and "literature from a century ago that took place in the streets around." She also questions how the landscape shaped the culture and history of the city as she employs it as metaphor for her marital and other life struggles: "Berlin's sandy floor, this soft and porous medium, exerts a constant, subtle downward pull. Does this explain the strange lethargy that sometimes hangs across the city?" Berlin's literary heritage, from Walter Benjamin to Christopher Isherwood, gets documented alongside its tumultuous history. In enumerating the atrocities of WWII, perspective is gained: "How can I lay my life's petty derailments and coincidental geographies alongside a violation of this scale?" It's a transfixing cultural topography that will appeal to readers of Rebecca Solnit.
