¿Qué soy, un ciervo?

by Polly Barton, Rita da Costa (Translator)

El debut de Polly Barton. Una disección hipnótica y feroz del deseo, la identidad y la obsesión.

Subida al escenario del colegio, vestida con un camisón dorado de su madre y un cepillo a modo de micrófono, una niña británica de doce años está a punto de convertirse en Céline Dion. La música no suena y acaba cantando a capela ante mil personas. Es ridículo. Pero valiente. Y también una revelació ¿qué ocurre cuando mostramos sin reservas la parte más cursi, intensa y vulnerable de nosotros mismos?

Años después, aquella niña se instala en Fráncfort para trabajar como localizadora de videojuegos. Traducir del japonés significa adaptar palabras, referencias y emociones de un mundo a otro, pero muy pronto comprende que también está intentando traducirse a sí reinventarse, encajar, convertirse en alguien más ligero, más seguro, más auténtico. Es entonces cuando un encuentro fortuito en el tranvía ―un desconocido le devuelve un paraguas olvidado― desencadena una obsesión amorosa que la acompañará a lo largo de un año y para la que solo encontrará alivio en sesiones de karaoke, donde las canciones pop dejan de ser un placer culpable para convertirse en una forma de verdad.

Con una prosa torrencial, inteligente y de una honestidad desarmante, Polly Barton convierte este relato de fascinación en una exploración deslumbrante de la identidad, el deseo, la vergüenza y las ficciones con las que damos sentido a nuestra vida. ¿Es posible abandonarse a una fantasía sin ironías? ¿Hasta qué punto la mirada del otro puede alterar la imagen que tenemos de nosotros mismos? ¿Y cuánto de nuestra existencia consiste, en realidad, en traducirnos constantemente para poder habitar el mundo? Entre Whitney Houston y The Cure, entre la euforia del karaoke y la soledad de la vida contemporánea, ¿Qué soy, un ciervo? es una novela tan divertida como filosóficamente aguda sobre la autenticidad, el anhelo de pertenencia y el vértigo de descubrir quiénes somos cuando dejamos de interpretar un papel.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Romance, Audiobook, Novels, Book Club

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2026

About the author

Polly Barton is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her debut book Fifty Sounds , a personal dictionary of the Japanese language, was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April 2021. In 2022, Fifty Sounds was shortlisted for the 2022 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.

Her translations have featured in Granta, Catapult, The White Review and Words Without Borders and her full length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press), Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull), which was shortlisted for the Ray Bradbury Prize, and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura (Bloomsbury).

Her new book, Porn: An Oral History , will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in March 2023 and La Nave di Teseo (Italy).

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best known for her literary translations and, recently, her non-fiction, this marks Polly Barton’s debut as a novelist. It’s an intense, exceptionally introspective piece centred on an unnamed narrator whose life history strongly resembles Barton’s own - suggesting a marked semi-autobiographical component. The narrator’s recounting her experiences a decade earlier when she was living and working in Germany. She’d moved there from London to act as a translator for Japanese versions of products produced by a Frankfurt-based games company. A move intended to kickstart a process of radical self-invention, a space in which she’d finally become the person she’d always longed to be, rather than the person she believed herself to be. Her sense was that the people around her were somehow balanced and whole but that she was fragmented, deeply self-conscious and conflicted. In Frankfurt, much of her spare time is spent obsessing about another worker in her building. A man who travels on the same tram to and from work. She calls him the “umbrella man” enigmatic, darkly handsome – his role as a focus for her fantasies and longings sometimes echoed aspects of Shakespeare’s famous Dark Lady. For the narrator, the umbrella man’s the epitome of everything she could possibly wish for, a stark contrast to the disappointingly-suffocating man she’s actually dating aka the “stylish man.”

The narrator’s state of what looks a lot like limerence is the catalyst for a series of musings and interrogations: the narrator’s likes and dislikes, her hopes, dreams and the constraints of her gender. She thinks about the romance narratives that have shaped her notion of what relationships should look like – from Austen novels to Disney movies. She seeks to explain the disconnect between how she’s living and her thoughts about how she should be living by drawing on Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism the habitual ways of thinking that impede self-awareness and self-realisation. In London the narrator’s partner was another woman yet she finds herself unable to evade heteronormative expectations - even though they’re steeped in heteropessimism or heterofatalism. The narrator’s internal struggles, her ambivalence consume her. Her accounts of grappling with a kind of existential angst often reminded me of representations of anxiety and alienation associated with writers like Rilke and Dazai albeit without the more harrowing descents – it was striking to see this playing out from a woman’s perspective for a change.

It's a highly intertextual piece from its title taken from Isabella Rossellini’s quirky Seduce Me pieces to snippets of philosophy stemming from the narrator’s undergraduate years – which aligns with Barton’s own background and philosophical grounding. The text is broken up by indirect references to pop songs. These, in turn, connect to the narrator’s love of karaoke which, like translation, allows her to temporarily inhabit other states of mind, other ways of thinking without fully investing or committing. It’s during these performances that the narrator feels most free. Commercial pop, particularly love songs, also provide the narrator with readymade forms of expression for otherwise overwhelming, confusing emotions. They render emotional states communicable, easily summarized and pinned-down, something the narrator finds almost impossible to do.

There’s little to no plot, this is very much in the vein of a bildungsroman, and there’s no rounded-off conclusion, other than the narrator’s passing from one state of being to another more manageable one. It’s an accomplished piece, thoughtful and insightful, with a number of arresting episodes and passages. But it didn’t quite work for me. I liked the overall concept, but I didn’t find the execution that engaging, it felt flat, forced, even ponderous at times. The narrator herself is fairly relatable but not always, unfortunately, that stimulating to read about.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Fitzcarraldo for an ARC

Rating: 2.5 rounded up

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an eccentric little book that took longer than expected to read (the stream-of-consciousness prose is best digested in small doses, I think) and was also packed with much more depth and introspection than the quirky premise conveyed. Yes, there are plenty of cringey and weird moments, but Barton also encapsulates so many nuances to being human that we seldom acknowledge. She chips away at the facade of being an 'outsider' only to reveal how universal alienation truly is. It's something special.

Limerence and sonder are the two main themes that our narrator's journey explores, and I grew quite attached to her. I think the ambitious scope (for a debut novel, anyway) both highlights Barton's strength as a writer and exposes some of her weaknesses. Some of the passages could use a bit of tightening up, as some sections feel unnecessarily bloated. I didn't necessarily hate the writing at any point, but the number of tangents the book takes you on can make tracing time and place a bit difficult. It's only when you finally return to a scene that you realize — oh right, this is where we were. The book starts abruptly and ends abruptly, so don't expect any meaningful bookends to her story.

Overall, I think Barton's writing is exceptional, and though virtually nothing about this story appealed to me at first glance (I remain ambivalent on karaoke, even upon finishing this), she still managed to get me excited to pick this up every time I had a spare moment. A real gem.

Illusions are said to be shattered, as though in one decisive moment, and certainly there are instants of dramatic smashing, a sudden burst of shimmering fragments, but she wonders if the more typical experience isn't a prolonged breaking. Or maybe: an illusion shatters in an instant, but a hope takes longer. A hope gives out in stages.
---
Independent bookstore day did terrible things to my wallet, but I got another Fitzcarraldo Edition, and I'm v excited about this one!!

Substack | Bookstagram | BookTok | BookTube | Bookshop.org Store | Libro.fm Bonus Offer

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brightly honest mediation on identity and learning what it is to belong (in its most general sense!!). With a painstakingly relatable character, this book kinda gave fleabag vibes with these sort of reflections on the myth of cool, whilst also exploring this idea of obsession in the scheme of adult crushes and relationships. This was honestly so refreshing and the prose was incredibly unique and well written. What a wonderful debut for my literary girlies 💌

[rubee ! · Rating 5 out of 5]

guys they published my diary

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unnamed young woman moves to Frankfurt to work as a translator at a games company, despite a lack of interest in gaming (and a mix of derision and jealousy about her colleagues’ interest in it). She quickly develops an intense crush on a guy who works at the same company, but with whom she never meaningfully interacts. The infatuation persists for a full year, during which she continues not to actually speak to this man even while he consumes a huge amount of her thinking. It survives alongside her actual relationship with another colleague (who’s mad about her, while she remains ambivalent and distant). But this book isn’t just about the crush, and of course the crush isn’t just about the crush either.

Running alongside this fixation is the protagonist’s love of karaoke, another pleasure she both relies on and feels embarrassed by. Karaoke, like the crush, becomes a lens through which she thinks about her place in the world, what translation means to her, her relationship to other people, her sexuality, her desire to be seen as serious and intelligent – the big, big things that come to life through the seemingly small and inconsequential everyday.

At one point, the protagonist becomes captivated by two series of videos made by Isabella Rossellini, collectively titled ‘Green Porno’ and ‘Seduce Me’, in which the actress, dressed in costumes, comically enacts the mating rituals of animals. It’s from one of these videos that the unusual – and at first glance inscrutable – title ‘what am I, a deer?’ is taken (variations of the phrase become a workplace injoke). The videos also stand for a type of artistic practice the protagonist admires and envies: ‘what creativity looks like when you aren’t worried about what people think of you.’

It’s this type of fearless creativity that Barton so brilliantly embodies in What Am I, a Deer? itself. This is narrative unafraid to look embarrassing things in the face and treat them with absolute sincerity. And in writing with such unabashed openness, Barton makes her character’s experiences and feelings perfectly legible. You don’t have to enjoy karaoke to immediately get what it stands for here. So often I felt like this story had been excavated directly out of my own brain, even though only perhaps a little of it is really directly relevant to my own experiences.

The Rossellini videos may be daft and frivolous on the surface but, to the right person, they are art; certainly, the protagonist finds them to be beautiful and meaningful to her. Similarly, this story concerns itself with things that are not (generally speaking) taken seriously – karaoke, pop music, work friendships, an infatuation with someone you’ve never spoken to – and fashions them into something far more transcendent. As a result, I felt this story in my bones, I felt it cut to my soul.

I really liked Barton’s memoir Fifty Sounds, but this is on another level altogether, a work of art. Unmissable. Gorgeous.

I received an advance review copy of What Am I, a Deer? from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Gigi · Rating 2 out of 5]

The kind of novel where you read twenty pages and you already know all its potential surprises have been, as far back as its earliest incarnation, sheered off at their inner edges to fit the preconceptions of a built-in audience that’s already read this book ten, twelve times under different titles, different authors. Its one breathless cadence very quickly creates a compression effect on the prose, its constant insistence of its own urgency flattens everything into an indistinct and bland goulash, a recipe for autofiction slop.
It has its moments, there’s many well formed turns of phrase and especially early on, moments I experienced recognition of certain feelings difficult to name effectively expressed, but it was never enough to invest in. Mostly it just felt overworked. As is often the case with this kind of writing it spends so much effort alchemizing moments of insight from its leaden bourgeois everydayness that it ignores fundamentals like rhythm, form, imagination, pacing, and like, writing a good sentence.

[makayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is for the vibes and the vibes only

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book continually put me in a bad mood and I'm still trying to figure out why. Stream of consciousness? A claustrophobic interiority? Mind-numbingly navel gazey? These are elements I typically love. It's the kind of book that I would have gobbled up and given 5 stars in 2023 and truthfully it's possible I would have felt differently had I read the physical copy. Though I think audio tends to work well for long, breathless sentences in narratives such as this, bringing to life the chaotic and often distracted torrent of a narrator's thoughts, in the case of this specific novel, it exhausted me. And perhaps exhaustion is the point, what other result can there be when you simulate a sense of urgency about mostly inane topics for 240 pages?

Of course, there were moments of connection, lines of thinking that pulled me in and made me think we were getting somewhere, words giving meaning to complex states of being; the bits about translation caught my attention, allowing me finally to grasp onto something of substance but the always eventual return to self-important ramblings on obsession and of all things, karaoke, lost me. I'm absolutely being a drama queen here but I can't remember the last time a book caused such visceral feelings of annoyance.

No plot, no vibes, just a bad time all around.

[Christopher Walthorne · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first world problems of an insular narcissist are not enough material for a novel.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Yeah I mean everyone knows that translation is just karaoke, anyway ………
There's definitely that element of pretending, of getting outside yourself, isn't there. But there's also something else, some kind of getting in. Some kind of being part of someone else's experience in a way that isn't usually accessible. Right!
She'd done it again, she knew as she spoke, she'd been over-earnest - or it wasn't earnestness exactly. What would they have called it? Being pretentious, probably, or attempted philosophizing, in any case, it was the thing that made them uncomfortable, that drove them outside their comfort zone. There definitely was a silence now.

Shortlisted for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize
 
The debut novel from a translator known to me for her International Booker shortlisted translation of Saou Ichikawa’s provocative anti-ableist “Hunchback”, and more widely known for her Waterstone’s Book of the Year translation of Asako Yuzuki’s “Butter”.
 
Drawing on her translation expertise (which includes an MA in the Theory and Practice of Translation from SOAS), her interest in philosophy (where she did a BA at Cambridge) and her time in Japan teaching English (where she also discovered a love of Karaoke) this is an intelligent novel which mixes a plethora of related ideas around concepts of translation, culturally fitting in and limerence (an idea the author had not known before writing the book but now widely quotes in interviews and which is effectively a form of intense infatuation with uncertain reciprocity) with a tale of modern life and workplace romance, all infused with karaoke and song lyrics; although it has to be said ultimately with the novel of ideas much more successful than the romance or karaoke pieces.
 
The novel – told in a close third party stream of consciousness (after a second person first chapter) – has as its subject a young English female translator(who has previously taught in Japan) who to her surprise (not least as she is at best a part time gamer) gets a job at a famous gaming firm at their Frankfurt office providing in game translation.
 
The start of the novel is in my view outstanding – and I had my five star review already mentally drafted. 
 
We have thoughts on translation – for example as she realises that in the gaming world with the overriding emphasis on player’s enjoyment, translation is about making sense to the player in their own language/culture and very much not on fidelity to the original, in contrast to the almost obsessive tension in literary fiction translation (less so – my comment – genre fiction).
 
And there are some millennial like musings on conformity/fitting in and enthusiasm versus cynicism – which for all my own cynicism on millennial musings I found simultaneously insightful, convincing and entertaining.
 
But then the narrator’s working life is rather upended by an infatuation she forms with a colleague she first encounters on a tram returning her umbrella and she remains infatuated with “umbrella man” engineering fleeting encounters at or near to work, while at the same time in a relationship with another man at her firm who in turn becomes infatuated with her and takes her attempts to break off the relationship very badly – the author has described this as a  limerence triangle.  The issue I had was that the relationship part was neither insightful, convincing or entertaining – a Guardian review compared this part to the “emotionally microscopic sensibility of Sally Rooney” but for me it felt more like a sub-de-Botton pastiche of patched over philosophy.
 
And as her life is upended she focuses increasingly on her first love – Karaoke (note that song lines are scattered through the novel acting almost as section breaks – although not in a manner I felt worked).  Some music parts worked really well for me – a dissection of the importance of rhythm that draws on the famous “breaks” in Garbage’s “Supervixen” (the opening track of their debut album) is excellent; others less so – the choice of a Radiohead song as the ultimate Karaoke track intriguing but the choice of “Idiotique” from the lamented Kid A less so.   But more seriously though the author entirely failed to transfer to me her love of Karaoke – I really think for this part of the novel to have been at all convincing I would have needed to come away thinking whether I should give it another go. 
 
There are though some interesting if at times forced passage where the core triad of ideas of translation, romantic obsession and Karaoke are linked together in what the author in interviews categorises as “exiting the self through accessing the other, but in a very one sided way” – and I think that also translated to a fourth element implicit in the novel – spending time in another culture/country (which can be extended to cultural immersion – reading translated fiction, following overseas sports - as well as physical relocation).
 
Although again I think this gets to the novel feeling like a philosophical exercise rather than a novel – by coincidence in the week before reading it I worked in both Japan and then Germany and yet the novel did not resonate at all with either experience.
 
Overall then a novel which for me did not live up to its promise but which I would not mind to see on some prize lists as I think it would lead to some interesting discussions as it is if nothing else very distinctive to most novels and that should be celebrated.
 

And she does want to nitpick because the test represented her first encounter with the practice of localization outside of the theory books she'd consulted during her MA. From these she knew that it was a term used predominantly in the contexts of game and other entertainment translation; that, as the name suggested, it was a form of translation that favoured a localizing approach i.e. switching concepts, nouns, idioms and so on over to a local equivalent rather than retaining that of the source culture. In other words, the governing principle of localization was that of privileging the experience of the consumer over fidelity to the original. She supposed that it was something about the clarity of this purpose, its unapologetic bullheadedness, that had bookmarked it in her head as an intriguing prospect. While studying on her MA, she'd been sometimes struck by the creeping feeling that translation proper - in particular, literary translation - was suspended between two schools of thought, incapable of making up its mind whether it was trying to create an experience for its new readers at least as enjoyable and immersive as the experience of those who'd read it in the original, or rather trying to represent the cultural and linguistic specificities of the source. Or perhaps, it never intended to decide outwardly, instead outsourcing the decision-making to the individual translator, whose skill was thought to lie in mediating between these two visions.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize

What Am I, a Deer? is the debut novel from Polly Barton, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Barton was a winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds as well as a International Booker and National Book Award for Translated Literature longlistee as the translator of Hunchback.

The narrator of What Am I, a Deer?, which, as she explains in her account takes its title from the Isabella Rossellini films, Seduce Me and Green Porno, is an aspiring literary translator, but, at the time the novel is set, working in Frankfurt for a Japanese video game company translating, or rather more specifically localising, the captions in games.

Her life there revolves around three pre-occupations - one with the art of translation itself; an obsessive crush on a co-worker, a limerent state of being; and with karaoke, which she, and the novel, take very seriously.

The author herself has said in interviews that these three elements provide 'some kind of complex mediation going on between her and the outside world. They’re all sites where the desire for connection and the self come together in an almost tricksy way. All of them ostensibly a way of getting outside of herself, and offering release, and communion, but all of them in a way coming back again and again to herself.'

And the resulting novel makes for a deliberate mixture of hi- and lo-culture, although that's a distinction the book does not recognise, an erudite romantic office comedy.

None of that was the cause of her discomfort, though, she understood, in time, it wasn't something interpersonal that irked her, but an issue with his theory of rhythm, a discomfort that felt just beyond her grasp. She tried at first probing his hypothesis for obvious counterarguments, as her mind tended to when it was trying on an idea for size, found herself thinking about people who actively enjoy arrhythmic music, and music that disrupts predictable rhythms in creative and interesting ways; remembered the thrill of first hearing the Garbage song 'Supervixen', the opening song from their debut self-titled album, where beats are regularly omitted from a thrashy, driven introduction, thinking initially that the CD was skipping and then learning to predict these omissions, while still admiring how they seemed to shake the whole song up. Yet the more she thought it through, the more it seemed that this kind of pleasure could still be framed as a derivative of rhythmicality, of expectation - whether you learned to anticipate that irregular beat, or precisely because you couldn't - and if anything it was an argument for, and not against, the man's theory.

Impressively different.

Interviews:

https://www.anothermag.com/design-liv...

https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-cul...

[Katherine Figura · Rating 1 out of 5]

this felt like the book a cool parisian girl would read at a cafe on a summer day with a cigarette and a glass of wine but alas i like sentences that don’t continue on for an entire paragraph

[Yahaira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look at me reading about karaoke, crushes that are leaning towards obsession, translation, and reinvention. Oh, and heteropessimism, because why not.

From the very first page, I knew this was going to be special. You start a book with a cringe childhood memory and I’m in. This is the kind of book I want to devour, but I forced myself to pace it, just so I can hold onto the thrill of having it to return to. Barton created this slightly off-kilter, extremely close third-person stream of consciousness where each long sentence just has the perfect energy to carry you along. In another writer’s hands this would have been suffocating, but in Barton’s hands it somehow adds momentum.

What is this even about? A woman thinks back on the year she impulsively moved to Frankfurt (after impulsively moving to Japan) to work at a video game company as a Japanese-to-English localization translator. The glaring irony of her situation is that she is a professional translator living in a country where she doesn't actually speak the language. Isolated and slightly adrift, she becomes fixated on a stranger she dubs "the umbrella man." Every morning, she tries to perfectly time her commute to run into him again—a compulsive routine that feels exactly like a character respawning in a video game—hoping this run will be the one where they actually connect. It’s a jarring contrast to the actual relationship she ends up in with a man she detachedly refers to as merely "the stylish man." She almost plays the role of an NPC in her own relationship, which is a testament to how smart and darkly funny this book really is. Do I even have to mention how toxic this relationship turns?

I’m going to leave the heteropessimism as a tease! But if you love watching, or maybe relate to, someone whose reality is completely overshadowed by their fantasies and who constantly latches onto people and places, convinced they'll magically provide this elusive sense of fulfillment she can never actually grasp, then you will be completely obsessed with this book.

[leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a cerebral, stream-of-consciousness novel following a woman trying to forge a sense of identity in the modern world. Its main theme is limerence, exploring the nature of an all-consuming, violent crush, which the narrator latches onto as her life starts to feel untethered. The narrator spends most of her time ruminating on every interaction she is part of and every thought that crosses her mind, finding it all humiliating. She is constantly striving to feel a sense of authenticity, even if it is a slippery, ever-changing concept.

I especially enjoyed the passages about the narrator’s work as a translator, and the ethical dilemmas / considerations one has to make when working on a translation. These insights were paralleled well with the narrator’s love of karaoke: two forms which allow us to inhabit other states of mind.
Despite some heavier themes, the book ends on a positive note, carrying the message that we should allow ourselves to lean into the things that bring us joy.

[J. Joseph · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF @ 74%.

I had wanted to DNF at 38%, 49%, and then finally gave in at 74%. This is the kind of literary fiction that originally made me afraid to read litfic -- a genre which has now become a favourite, despite those initial fears.

Ultimately, it examines the difference between loneliness and being alone, and I wish I had left it alone.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

First Impressions
Most of us have, at some point, built an entire inner life around someone we barely know. Maybe it was a stranger glimpsed on the same commute every morning, or a person whose few words to us we replayed until they carried enormous weight. These fixations can feel embarrassing to admit, but they say so much about what we're lacking and what we long for. "What Am I, A Deer?" by Polly Barton is a slender novel that takes this very ordinary experience and turns it into something surprisingly moving and extremely thoughtful. I didn't expect a book this short to affect me so much, but it captures beautifully what it feels like to live a modern life: the work of breaking through our own insecurities and awkwardness to reach for some form of authenticity and true connection.

Tram Rides and the Umbrella Man
On the surface, the story is fairly simple. A young woman moves to Frankfurt to translate Japanese for a famous gaming company, despite having little interest in games. She's set on a kind of reinvention, but she finds herself caught in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing on her morning commute. Then a nice-eyed stranger returns the umbrella she left behind on the tram, and she's catapulted into a year-long obsession with him. The novel calls him simply "umbrella man", and elsewhere the term "John King" stands in for any form of idealised man. These names are generic on purpose. What matters is less the man himself than the space he fills in her imagination.

So while this is partly a romance, a longing for an unobtainable crush, it's about much more than the messiness of sex and relationships. The novel ponders how our desires, whether professional, personal or romantic, become inextricably linked with wanting to fill the empty parts of our inner lives. I found this so perceptive. There's a real honesty in how the narrator recognises that what she craves isn't really this particular man, but a feeling of being fully present and alive that he seems to promise.

Karaoke as a Way of Being
I love that the novel begins with a memory of the narrator as a child wanting to become Celine Dion, performing a cappella in front of her classmates. It's such a tender scene because it captures that childhood urge to step fully into a bigger, braver version of yourself, however mortifying it might look to everyone else. (It also sent me down a rabbit hole of listening to Celine Dion songs.) This memory leads into how karaoke comes to represent an expression of her inner being as an adult. In dark, sweaty karaoke booths, her longings merge with the lyrics of emotionally charged songs, from Mis-Teeq's "Scandalous" to Fiona Apple's "I Want You to Love Me".

I really liked the way lyrics are interspersed through the story to round off the main character's feelings. Rather than feeling like a gimmick, this felt true to how many of us actually experience music: a song can articulate an emotion we're unable or unwilling to say aloud ourselves. Karaoke becomes a strangely poignant form of self-expression here, and a kind of solace that's both ecstatic and a little desperate.

Playing with Form
It's so sly how the opening section moves from the second person into the third person, which carries the bulk of the narrative. It happens so smoothly that the reader is drawn into the character's perspective before we fully notice the shift, and it subtly plays with the distance between the narrator and herself. As one of the judges of this year's Goldsmiths Prize, Francis Spufford, remarked, sometimes the frontier for innovation in the novel is an interior one. Barton finds a flowing, intricate and almost obsessive language for consciousness that extends the great modernist experiments in charting minds in motion.
The novel's title comes from Isabella Rossellini's series of "Green Porno" and "Seduce Me" videos about sex in the animal kingdom, and I enjoyed how Rossellini's quirky reflections are integrated into the story. The book opens with an epigraph from Catherine Lacey's "Biography of X", a novel I loved, alongside a lyric from Mis-Teeq, which feels like the perfect signal for what follows. There's a playful blend of high culture and academic theory with pop culture throughout, and this mix captures something essential about modern life, where we move between the profound and the throwaway every day and often find meaning in the unlikeliest places.

From Translator to Novelist
You might well have come across Polly Barton's name before, as she's the acclaimed translator of many Japanese novels, including Asako Yuzuki's hugely popular "Butter" and Saou Ichikawa's "Hunchback", which I read and which was listed for the International Booker Prize. She has also published two works of non-fiction, "Fifty Sounds" and "Porn: An Oral History". It's fascinating to see her craft her own fiction, and the novel's protagonist, a translator navigating life in another country and language, feels charged with insights about what it means to move between cultures and selves. "What Am I, A Deer?" is her debut novel, and it has been shortlisted for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize.

Verdict
This is a thoughtful, sly and funny book about breaking through awkwardness to reach something authentic. It renders the paradoxes of modern life with real complexity while remaining deeply tender towards its heroine and her yearning. Of all the books on this year's Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, it was the one that most surprised me with how moving I found it.


Read more of my reviews on my book blog LonesomeReader or check out the videos on my BookTube channel or consider joining my Bookclub

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book so much, Barton writes with such intricacy and sweetness about her life full of translation, karaoke and office love affairs. The writing is a stream of consciousness and so it really pays off to settle into the book and let it take you away - I wouldn't say it's a light read because it is filled with such sharp emotion and great writing, but it is super easy to slip into and fall in love with. I have enjoyed Barton's Japanese translations a lot in the past and so it is great to be able to read her fiction. The bits about karaoke and her relationships were particularly striking to me and anyone who is passionate about translation is automatically super interesting to read writing from. Can't wait for another book from her as this was great.

[summer⁎ ˚ ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆ · Rating 4 out of 5]

another book im glad i didn't look at the rating of before i started. though i totally understand why the rating is so low, i really enjoyed the book. it is an endless stream of consciousness, memory, and reflection but i just enjoyed it. it felt a little long towards the tail end and it began to lose me, but it was fun. i always admire the endless source of creativity these types of books have. i know it's loosely based off barton's life (I have no knowledge of this author aside from this) but still it felt wealthy of experience and introspection.

[Chloe · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s just, meh? Doesn’t hold my attention at all.

[Angie Miale · Rating 2 out of 5]

These offset picks are not for me. I can’t follow this, I am not highbrow or intellectual enough. If you loved this book, I envy you. I would like to say I will not get any more of the offset, but I definitely will still buy them and read them and not like them because I hate to feel left out. I’m 0 for 2.

[Elizabeth Tuttle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this is exhausting, only the way being inside my own head is exhausting.

Barton is skilled at representing interiority on the page, particularly for an obsessive character who considers herself on the social periphery.

[Nadia Zeemeeuw · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a journey that was! I tried to jump off this train more than once, but somehow made it all the way to the end. Mostly because some of the thoughts and feelings in this stream of consciousness resonated with me deeply. Still, I found the writing a bit too trying and the narrator’s voice a little too irritating. To be fair, if I ever published my own diary, I’d probably find it just as annoying to read. It was a good reminder that not every thought or feeling have to be transferred into a book.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 3 out of 5]

How did you become a monster to yourself in such a short space of time? You try to grasp the essence of the change and it slips away from you. You just know that at some point you came to feel a very different way about how you looked and your obsessions... which is to say that sometimes you look back and you wonder if actually everything that was waiting for you was already contained there...on the bare soles of your own grown feet.

[victoria marie]

Shortlisted for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize

You are a girl, twelve years of age, still small enough to fit into your mother's gold satin nightie, still too far removed from puberty's comprehensive rewiring of reality to suspect that someday that might not be the case, still so perfectly and utterly flat-chested that the nightgown's plummeting neckline seems destined to be either a sad mockery of your figure or an inappropriate choice for a pre-pubescent girl, depending on your view, and yet neither of these, as it happens, turns out to be your view, which is likely bound up with how neither seems to be your mother's view either, when you slip it on she nods once, deeply, then laughs in approval, a reaction which seems to come down at least in part to the way that the pieces of satin are stitched together, which is to say, when you step over to the mirror you realize with a shock that the slight darting at the bust has made it look as though there is something more than just air down there - but no, it's not just that, it's as if the satin nightie has moved you into a world where you do have breasts, allowed you to believe that you really do have them, a magical sort of belief which is very closely related to the feeling that in fact anything is possible, any transformative feat of the imagination is possible, and it's on that basis that you decide that the garment will do for the occasion in question, namely, your transformation into Céline Dion. (13; first sentence)

*

Are they seducing me? What am I, a DEER? (106)

*

He could go fuck himself and his martyrdom and his stupid faux-naive drawings. They weren't even good, in fact they were really quite boring, all of that stuff about wanting to draw like a child was so tired, and if you were going to do it you had to bring to it something more than simply longing for mummy. As if he'd heard her thoughts, things fell eerily silent. All was quiet on every communicational front. Half of her felt, as before, that she couldn't believe her luck, while the other half very literally refused to believe that she had been so lucky. Time would vindicate this latter half. (144-5)

*

[…] she attempted to explain it to her on the phone, had said, in a moment of frankness, how she was fed up of being told how to think, how to feel, and her mother had responded by saying, don't you think that's a bit dra-matic, it doesn't sound like the worst fate to be regaled with notes and gifts, it sounds quite romantic, I imagine he's just trying to be nice, and she had snapped back, he's the one that's fucking dramatic, I don't want to live inside his stupid play any more. The moment she put the phone down she felt like a brat. She was a brat. She just wished that someone, anyone, could understand how it was that these things worked on you, slowly and over time, how the niceness transformed itself into something less nice, how romance could also throttle you. (194)

*

[…] starting again, but still here, and the thought was like glancing up at a sky filled with stars,
fathomless and full

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD

AS WE KNOW IT

(AND I FEEL FINE)

(212)

*

They'd write that on her gravestone, she thought:
She might have been a great man, were it not that she craved closeness. (214)

*

You could enjoy karaoke through the joy of inhabiting specifically a certain song, voice, singer, but she felt that you couldn't truly love it without rejoicing in the collapsing of any fixed tie to any identity, to allowing yourself and being allowed to be everybody, karaoke was, in her thinking, the opposite of having a song, it was having every song, and no song, and basking in the promise of that. It was the biggest feeling. (219)

==============

with the long sentences (oh how I will always love those!), some definite—at least to me—neurodivergent looping in telling stories within stories, plus references to translations & more, I feel like this should be an automatic five stars & one of my “number one stunners” of the year… but it’s lacking something. I can’t pinpoint it exactly… maybe due to the long curving sentences not having enough “oomph” in the delivery?? space between each‽ idk.

some friends that I usually agree with on books have rated this quite low… I can’t really go below maybe four stars, myself… at least my first impression… but will say that I’m glad that I read it in print, as the audio would’ve definitely driven me a bit wacky like others have said!! so recommend print only for this book.

wouldn’t be surprised to see this on the booker longlist, but there’s such stellar works out there (& hoping even more that I don’t know yet!) that I wouldn’t want it to go further than that… but still thinking on it all.

/////////////

2026 Goldsmiths Prize
in-progress ranking of shortlist
—Attention-Seeking Behavior, Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
—The Vivisectors, Missouri Williams
—What Am I, a Deer? Polly Barton
[3/6 read so far…]

[Lauren Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is for my fleabag lovers and lit fic girlies! I adored this, I really felt like the main character was inside my brain at times. Now I want to go and do karaoke !!

[Abby Greer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly fucking insufferable

[rhea · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

woman obsessed with karaoke finds out a crush is really just a lack of information

[Colleen Grablick · Rating 5 out of 5]

🚨BANGER ALARM 🚨what if it’s okay to be ugly and awkward? what if the key to liberation is karaoke? what if you need to crush on the blockhead loser to realize heterosexuality is a prison you’ve incarcerated yourself in? what if coworkers were real people? I LOVED THIS!!!

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

We get it. You like karaoke. (I feel like I was listening to this audiobook for so long it became my own annoying internal voice (I too like karaoke). Some nice ideas and turns of phrase but would have liked much better as an essay)

[Jordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I would have enjoyed this more in my twenties, and maybe it’s my own self-loathing that made me dislike this, but the attempt at depth and introspection felt quite shallow and underdeveloped to me.