The Pram in the Hallway
The novel started life as a fictional collection of suicide notes which I had no real ambition for other than the immediate and cathartic function they served at the time. There is very little evidence of those bleak and early outpourings in the finished novel, but I think Go To Sleep is underpinned by a quiet desperation that reflects my own experience of early motherhood. I wrote it in a fever, I was desperate to put something down for posterity, to capture the way I saw the world before my mental state shifted which it did dramatically twelve months down the line.
Kerry Ryan interviews Helen Walsh.
Excerpt: The Walls of Berlin
At some point in the terminal decades of the GDR, the original and indestructible stone cladding which formed the predominant surface of the Karl-Marx-Allee had been mysteriously replaced here by a celluloid casing, as though intended as a screen for outdoor film projections, in which the film’s own celluloid had unaccountably been confounded with the surface on which it was to be projected, resulting in an ultimately awry, film-inflected urban surface.
An excerpt from Stephen Barber‘s The Walls of Berlin.
It Tolls for Thee
As Julius’ walks expand geographically, circumnavigating the city in wider and wider loops, his mental wanderings slowly converge to a series of landmarks in his past, including the story of his grandmother who survived the fall of Berlin in 1945 and his memories of attending a military school back home. The apex is his father’s funeral and the sudden recollection of another, long-forgotten, carefully blocked out death. The mood gradually gets darker until we reach the novel’s sensual climax, a Ballardian (minus the sex) car crash scene, and this “vision of needless suffering” is followed by an even more surreal and painful revelation, also strangely devoid of sex.
Anna Aslanyan reviews Teju Cole‘s Open City.