Berlin Atomized

" Berlin Atomized is the world bridged, coupled, and made fast—by the latest lost generation and by Julia Kornberg's border-and-genre-crossing talent, as restless as a flame." —Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Jewish Book Award-winning The Netanyahus It is a kinetic, globetrotting novel that follows three siblings—Jewish and downwardly mobile—from 2001 to 2034 as they come of age against the major crises of the 21st century. Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervour and repeating: "I am not asleep." She grows up partying and taking undeserved siestas. At the same time, her eldest brother, Jeremías, is drawn into the city's powder keg music scene, and the middle sibling, Mateo, learns of his terminal illness and prepares to join the IDF. Though Argentina faces the worst economic crisis in its history, the Goldsteins are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working-class families. Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater and their family scattered all over the earth. The novel's second half takes place between 2018 and 2035, invoking and imagining possible futures for this existence in migration. Jeremías lives in Paris until an undeclared war destroys the city, and Nina, after tracing Mateo's last steps to his death in Tel Aviv, ends up in Berlin, where the European Union is found in the shambles of its own history. From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin to Jerusalem, Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another. Defiant and dexterous, percussive and percolating with violent light, Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg's napalm-ic debut—a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised.