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The Cold Centre
Inka Parei’s novel The Cold Centre begins with a man who receives a startling call from his ex-wife. She’s in the hospital, awaiting a cancer diagnosis. His mind races as he suddenly realizes he must find out whether she was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Quickly returning to the city, he tries to reconstruct the events of a few days so many years ago, and he revisits and questions his own memories of working in the chilling “cold centre”—the air conditioning plant for the East German party newspaper. Did she come in contact with a contaminated truck from the Ukraine? Was he a cog at the heart of the system, failing to prevent a tragic accident? Can he find out what happened before it’s too late? He soon begins to lose control over his days in Berlin, entering into a desperate search for orientation over a fracture in his own life—one he has never gotten over.
Written in Parei’s characteristically precise prose, The Cold Centre is a timely reminder of how we react to accidents—nuclear and otherwise— and a bleakly realistic description of East Berlin before the Wall fell. Its tight and dizzying structure keeps readers on the edge of their seats as the narrator tries to solve his mystery.
Written in Parei’s characteristically precise prose, The Cold Centre is a timely reminder of how we react to accidents—nuclear and otherwise— and a bleakly realistic description of East Berlin before the Wall fell. Its tight and dizzying structure keeps readers on the edge of their seats as the narrator tries to solve his mystery.
- GenresFiction
158 pages, Hardcover
First published August 8, 2011
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56 people want to read
About the author
Inka Parei
6 books2 followersInka Parei (born 1967 in Frankfurt) is a German writer who lives in Berlin. She studied sociology, political science, sinology and German studies. Parei won the 2003 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for excerpts from her book Was Dunkelheit war.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 1, 2020
Inka Parei's The Cold Centre (2011) (translated by Katy Derbyshire, 2014)
The book has no chapters, no quotation marks to indicate the story character's actual speaking, but the reader soon gets the convention and the points where dialogue happens. This is likely very similar to the experience of listening to a German speak in another language not German (say in Italian, which I've had heard delivered at a symposium on Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, and quickly realizing that the Italian in the German speaker's rendering is not just scholarly monotonal but a studied flatness).
The story is perhaps of this sort, in the full background where something is to be figured out, in the deontology of the narrative, the duty to be undertaken on behalf of someone, for whom feelings are an undertow. By the end of the book I am reminded of Henry James's novella The Beast in the Jungle, in the complicated pouncing that happens and does not happen in this figuring out.
The story is also about place and time. To the reader who has had the experience of working at a 24/7 facility such as a power plant and similar critical infrastructure, the things that happen in the story can be strangely familiar and fully accessible: logbooks, shift work, job hierarchies. To the reader who has had to deal with accidents and snafus, what might come across as the drag in the narrative and the characters involved are truly alive. It is just that over this entire function, change also comes: the critical pieces break down and something bifurcates quickly or slowly into decay.
There is also a menace underneath: it should be up to the reader to decide if that menacing is cause or effect. What might this menace be? The tunnel, time, memory, a plethora of things, in their formalities, in their material and immaterial sundry.
The book has no chapters, no quotation marks to indicate the story character's actual speaking, but the reader soon gets the convention and the points where dialogue happens. This is likely very similar to the experience of listening to a German speak in another language not German (say in Italian, which I've had heard delivered at a symposium on Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, and quickly realizing that the Italian in the German speaker's rendering is not just scholarly monotonal but a studied flatness).
The story is perhaps of this sort, in the full background where something is to be figured out, in the deontology of the narrative, the duty to be undertaken on behalf of someone, for whom feelings are an undertow. By the end of the book I am reminded of Henry James's novella The Beast in the Jungle, in the complicated pouncing that happens and does not happen in this figuring out.
The story is also about place and time. To the reader who has had the experience of working at a 24/7 facility such as a power plant and similar critical infrastructure, the things that happen in the story can be strangely familiar and fully accessible: logbooks, shift work, job hierarchies. To the reader who has had to deal with accidents and snafus, what might come across as the drag in the narrative and the characters involved are truly alive. It is just that over this entire function, change also comes: the critical pieces break down and something bifurcates quickly or slowly into decay.
There is also a menace underneath: it should be up to the reader to decide if that menacing is cause or effect. What might this menace be? The tunnel, time, memory, a plethora of things, in their formalities, in their material and immaterial sundry.
August 24, 2017
La ex mujer del protagonista acaba de ser diagnosticada de cáncer. Ella llama al protagonista de esta historia para que averigüe si la enfermedad fue causada por un accidente ocurrido en la central nuclear de Chernóbil. ¿Estuvo su ex mujer en contacto con un camión contaminado que llegó a la central de frío de Ucrania? El protagonista debe volver al pasado para reconstruir lo que pasó y en ese volver al pasado se encuentra con sus propios miedos, su propio sufrimiento enmudecido en una época previa a la caída del muro de Berlín.
October 11, 2022
Pse. Una historia de entrada muy interesante pero que se deslavaza intentando abarcar demasiados temas (Chernobil, secuelas de la contaminación, la vida antes y después del muro de Berlín, el choque de quien cambia de lado de Berlín...) con una excusa que en principio es redonda pero que finalmente queda fatal resuelta. De esos libros que pudieron haber sido y no fueron.
April 1, 2015
Time has a funny way of playing tricks on us. So to do our memories. We may remember something that happened to us decades ago in vivid detail. Ask us to describe a situation that we were involved in just last week however and we might fumble over the details and struggle to conjure a picture of the event in our mind’s eye. Even when we’re absolutely certain that our memories hold the truth they may not tell the whole story. What we’re convinced we witnessed may only be a small piece of a much larger picture. In Inka Parei’s stunning puzzler The Cold Centre, a nameless man must reexamine the recollections of his past in a desperate race against time. If he wants to have any hope of saving his ex-wife Martha’s life, he’ll need to unravel the mystery at the heart of an emotionally charged event from over twenty years ago, one that altered the course of his life forever.
This journey of self-discovery won’t be an easy one. It will take him back to Berlin and back into the heart of the former German Democratic Republic, a place where in the mid-eighties, straight out of school, he trained for a position as an HVAC mechanic. This job involved overseeing the difficult task of manufacturing different degrees of cold air for the massive warehouse like offices of the Neues Deutschland newspaper. The room storing the giant rolls of paper needed to be a different temperature from the one housing the printing presses which in turn needed to be different from the area where the editorial staff was situated. It’s only looking backwards now that the man realizes the role he so readily played, supporting the publication and distribution of propaganda related to a system of political beliefs that have long since been rejected. He did it not because he necessarily agreed or disagreed with the paper’s contents, but because much like a child feels safest in the comforts of their home, this political environment in which he grew up was the only state of normality he was accustomed to.
READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/the-c...
This journey of self-discovery won’t be an easy one. It will take him back to Berlin and back into the heart of the former German Democratic Republic, a place where in the mid-eighties, straight out of school, he trained for a position as an HVAC mechanic. This job involved overseeing the difficult task of manufacturing different degrees of cold air for the massive warehouse like offices of the Neues Deutschland newspaper. The room storing the giant rolls of paper needed to be a different temperature from the one housing the printing presses which in turn needed to be different from the area where the editorial staff was situated. It’s only looking backwards now that the man realizes the role he so readily played, supporting the publication and distribution of propaganda related to a system of political beliefs that have long since been rejected. He did it not because he necessarily agreed or disagreed with the paper’s contents, but because much like a child feels safest in the comforts of their home, this political environment in which he grew up was the only state of normality he was accustomed to.
READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/the-c...
January 16, 2017
Der (namenlose) Erzähler muss sich an längst Vergangenes erinnern, um seiner Ex-Frau Martha das Leben zu retten. Als Klimatechniker in der DDR war sein Arbeitsort die namensgebende Kältezentrale, bis ihn ein einschneidendes Erlebnis dazu treibt, seine Arbeit aufzugeben. Er reist schliesslich aus und beginnt in der BRD ein zweites (Arbeits-)Leben. Dies alles erfahren wir in sehr sprunghaften Rückblenden, bei denen oft auf den ersten Blick nicht klar ist, in welcher Zeit wir uns gerade befinden. Diese heftigen Zeitsprünge sind es auch, die zu grosser Konzentration auf die kapitellose Geschichte zwingen, die man am besten in einem Rutsch durchliest. Neben der privaten Geschichte des Erzählers fliessen auch die Ereignisse der Zeit (Tschernobyl, Mauerfall) in die persönlichen Rückblenden ein und ergeben so ein feines Zeitgewebe, das einen Einblick in damalige Verhältnisse erlaubt. Insgesamt hat mir das Buch gut gefallen, nur die Zeitsprünge waren wir mich ab und zu etwas zu heftig.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews