Book Post -- The Artificial Silk Girl
Jun. 29th, 2019 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureThe Artificial Silk Girl was a happy surprise.
I've been on a book-buying fast – another thing I would once have thought impossible – but I was low the other day, and I knew a trip to Russell Books would bolster me.
In the fall, Russell is moving across the street into the old Staples location, which has two expansive floors and an escalator. Normally I worry for small businesses that scale up. However, since the titular books are already scattered through four downtown locations (three in a cluster and one a couple of streets over), this might actually be downsizing. It must be easier to administrate.
Obviously, I'm dead excited at the idea of a mega-used-bookstore here in town on the model of Powell's. If there's also a coffee shop, my twenty-eight years of slouching about this town doing very little will not have been in vain.1
Anyway, Russell is still in its current location, which is perfectly good for wandering. I fetched up with a copy of Cider with Rosie. Then I happened to put my hand up to a small pinkish hardcover, and that was The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun, translated by Kathie von Ankum. The book was published in Germany in 1931. It was banned and destroyed in 1933.
Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war.
When I began reading, I immediately thought of Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it appears (at least from the blurb) that the author was inspired by that book. Another obvious touchstone is Isherwood's Berlin Stories. I would add to this mix the novels of Jean Rhys, with their desperate female protagonists struggling to find some way to support themselves or to be supported.
Doris, the protagonist, is more self-aware than Lorelei Lee – poorer, less successful, with fewer offers of rescue. The book is more forthcoming about the sexual transactions she negotiates and her ambivalent feelings about them. Still, I did not love the first quarter or so of this book. It felt like a series of set pieces of cringey faux pas in the Blondes vein, but more labored.
However, When she flees to Berlin, something shifts, too, in the novel, like a small convulsion of muscle that transforms the whole gesture of the book.
The tone becomes feverish, the prose more experimental. We still observe the irony of Doris' alternately blithe and melancholy self-contradictions, but as she grows poorer and more desperate – and also more compassionate – her story begins to feel more crucial. In one sequence, she takes a friend/lover/neighbor blinded in the Great War out for a last walk; the next day, his wife will send him to an institution. Doris leads him through Berlin, encouraging him to enjoy the sensory experience, and describing the sights. She wants to give him a magical night, but she is more and more despairing, he is miserable, and the city is full of unease. Finally, he says "The city isn't good and the city isn't happy and the city is sick, but you are good and I thank you."
Is this an anti-Nazi book? In tenor, yes, but not forcefully enough to be satisfying. It makes fun of fascists, but they remain mostly absurd rather than monstrous, and Doris is able to move among them. She briefly pretends to be Jewish at one point, but this is played as a comic misunderstanding. She mostly struggles to stay apolitical. Her lack of papers is a central difficulty, but she is not arrested or detained. Of course, I wanted Doris to join the communists and resist, but instead she falls in love. The poverty and unemployment of the late Weimar years is everywhere apparent. The men she meets come from all classes, which allows the author a wide scope for portraiture, but Doris and her closest friends are all working-class and struggling.
This novel was a really interesting artifact, an observation of the uncanny moment just before horror breaks through. It was written by someone who seemed at least partly aware that the prospects were bad, even if this is communicated through romantic rather than political collapse.
{rf}
I've been on a book-buying fast – another thing I would once have thought impossible – but I was low the other day, and I knew a trip to Russell Books would bolster me.
In the fall, Russell is moving across the street into the old Staples location, which has two expansive floors and an escalator. Normally I worry for small businesses that scale up. However, since the titular books are already scattered through four downtown locations (three in a cluster and one a couple of streets over), this might actually be downsizing. It must be easier to administrate.
Obviously, I'm dead excited at the idea of a mega-used-bookstore here in town on the model of Powell's. If there's also a coffee shop, my twenty-eight years of slouching about this town doing very little will not have been in vain.1
Anyway, Russell is still in its current location, which is perfectly good for wandering. I fetched up with a copy of Cider with Rosie. Then I happened to put my hand up to a small pinkish hardcover, and that was The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun, translated by Kathie von Ankum. The book was published in Germany in 1931. It was banned and destroyed in 1933.
Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war.
When I began reading, I immediately thought of Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it appears (at least from the blurb) that the author was inspired by that book. Another obvious touchstone is Isherwood's Berlin Stories. I would add to this mix the novels of Jean Rhys, with their desperate female protagonists struggling to find some way to support themselves or to be supported.
Doris, the protagonist, is more self-aware than Lorelei Lee – poorer, less successful, with fewer offers of rescue. The book is more forthcoming about the sexual transactions she negotiates and her ambivalent feelings about them. Still, I did not love the first quarter or so of this book. It felt like a series of set pieces of cringey faux pas in the Blondes vein, but more labored.
However, When she flees to Berlin, something shifts, too, in the novel, like a small convulsion of muscle that transforms the whole gesture of the book.
The tone becomes feverish, the prose more experimental. We still observe the irony of Doris' alternately blithe and melancholy self-contradictions, but as she grows poorer and more desperate – and also more compassionate – her story begins to feel more crucial. In one sequence, she takes a friend/lover/neighbor blinded in the Great War out for a last walk; the next day, his wife will send him to an institution. Doris leads him through Berlin, encouraging him to enjoy the sensory experience, and describing the sights. She wants to give him a magical night, but she is more and more despairing, he is miserable, and the city is full of unease. Finally, he says "The city isn't good and the city isn't happy and the city is sick, but you are good and I thank you."
Is this an anti-Nazi book? In tenor, yes, but not forcefully enough to be satisfying. It makes fun of fascists, but they remain mostly absurd rather than monstrous, and Doris is able to move among them. She briefly pretends to be Jewish at one point, but this is played as a comic misunderstanding. She mostly struggles to stay apolitical. Her lack of papers is a central difficulty, but she is not arrested or detained. Of course, I wanted Doris to join the communists and resist, but instead she falls in love. The poverty and unemployment of the late Weimar years is everywhere apparent. The men she meets come from all classes, which allows the author a wide scope for portraiture, but Doris and her closest friends are all working-class and struggling.
This novel was a really interesting artifact, an observation of the uncanny moment just before horror breaks through. It was written by someone who seemed at least partly aware that the prospects were bad, even if this is communicated through romantic rather than political collapse.
{rf}
no subject
Date: 2019-06-30 06:15 am (UTC)Yay!
(I have both that book and Keun's After Midnight (1937), which may supply the politics you found lacking in the earlier novel.)
no subject
Date: 2019-06-30 06:20 pm (UTC)Keun's own story seems complex, from the few details I could sift out of the Internet. Do you know much about her life? Some of her choices seem opaque to me, which makes me wonder what I don't know.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-30 09:03 pm (UTC)I liked it very much at the time when I read it, which I want to say was in graduate school; I think feverish is a good description of its tone overall and I wasn't evaluating it in terms of nascent fascism except in the strictly historical sense, which probably means I would get more out of it now, but also that I suspect it would upset me in ways it didn't then.
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