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My Red Heaven
Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters ― some historic, some invented ― crossing paths on the streets of Berlin.
The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg ― as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts.
Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich’s painting by the same name, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable. A terrific read for fans of Richard Powers' The Overstory and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin.
The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg ― as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts.
Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich’s painting by the same name, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable. A terrific read for fans of Richard Powers' The Overstory and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published January 21, 2020
About the author
Lance Olsen
59 books122 followersLance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 2, 2025
"All that remains is our bungled joy, the sensation of those moments we've forgotten that were important as they were passing..."
- Lance Olsen, My Read Heaven
"...there will always be rebels. And you know who they are: the mutinous poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, mystics, thinkers, journalists...and other outcasts willing to accept personal sacrifice in the name of principle. They live in the shadows. They're poor. The state has little toleration for them. Mass propaganda has conditioned society to belittle them as parasites and traitors. They live that way, not because it's exotic or adventurous, but because to collaborate with radical evil is to betray all that is beautiful and good."
- Lance Olsen, My Read Heaven
I'm still digesting all the pieces. The fragments. Some of them literally are stuck in my throat. Notes I've taken have literally fallen into my bath (the penciled notes fade, the ink notes blur). I love it. Way more than I expected and I expected a lot. Lance is genius. He captures a city: Berlin. He captures a time: 1927. He captures humanity in whispers, fragments, stolen moments, banal thoughts, death, disease, sex, sadness and hundreds of other moments united by butterflies, clouds and shadows. He weaves a tapestry of Germany between two wars and the web of beauty and life and death that unites them (and all of us). I thought I was getting into a contemporary, artistic novel that seemed a bit like Vollmann meets Jonathan Littell meets James Joyce. And yes. It was a bit of those. But the ghosts and ghost notes somehow blend the pieces of this wonderful novel into something new. Something more graceful than the sum of its parts, and more beautiful than the weight of Olsen's soul.
- One could say Berlin is a captive of the nineteenth century (75).
- Berlin: the imperial hallucination (76).
- Berlin: a doomed Pompeii (81).
- If Berlin were a part of speech, he heard, it would be a transitive verb (116).
I can’t recommend it enough. No. Wait. I'm not done here. I need to go reread my notes, untangle my flags, untie my thoughts.
- Lance Olsen, My Read Heaven
"...there will always be rebels. And you know who they are: the mutinous poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, mystics, thinkers, journalists...and other outcasts willing to accept personal sacrifice in the name of principle. They live in the shadows. They're poor. The state has little toleration for them. Mass propaganda has conditioned society to belittle them as parasites and traitors. They live that way, not because it's exotic or adventurous, but because to collaborate with radical evil is to betray all that is beautiful and good."
- Lance Olsen, My Read Heaven
I'm still digesting all the pieces. The fragments. Some of them literally are stuck in my throat. Notes I've taken have literally fallen into my bath (the penciled notes fade, the ink notes blur). I love it. Way more than I expected and I expected a lot. Lance is genius. He captures a city: Berlin. He captures a time: 1927. He captures humanity in whispers, fragments, stolen moments, banal thoughts, death, disease, sex, sadness and hundreds of other moments united by butterflies, clouds and shadows. He weaves a tapestry of Germany between two wars and the web of beauty and life and death that unites them (and all of us). I thought I was getting into a contemporary, artistic novel that seemed a bit like Vollmann meets Jonathan Littell meets James Joyce. And yes. It was a bit of those. But the ghosts and ghost notes somehow blend the pieces of this wonderful novel into something new. Something more graceful than the sum of its parts, and more beautiful than the weight of Olsen's soul.
- One could say Berlin is a captive of the nineteenth century (75).
- Berlin: the imperial hallucination (76).
- Berlin: a doomed Pompeii (81).
- If Berlin were a part of speech, he heard, it would be a transitive verb (116).
I can’t recommend it enough. No. Wait. I'm not done here. I need to go reread my notes, untangle my flags, untie my thoughts.
Read
June 23, 2023Some quick thoughts here: https://youtu.be/O2yFHpgqPpw
March 10, 2020
A modern meditation on humanity. Lance Olsen examines a single day in Germany in the year 1927. Along the way, the reader is introduced to fictional and famous people alike, among them Heidegger, Hitler, Einstein, Nabokov, Heisenberg, and a dog named Delia. There is no plot here. This is a philosophical work of sorts, an examination of humanity told through vignettes. We peer into the minds of men and women and children, we view their movements, the incongruities between their intentions and actions, their values and their deeds. We see hope, we see deceit, and we see death.
At its basic level, it is structured like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, with the narrative torch passing from one point of view to the next as each character crosses paths with one another. You never know who the next person will be, and the chapter/section titles never provide predictive information. The whole thing is like a continuous red herring, where you think you might know where it is going, but it instead makes a turn and leaves you fumbling for meaning. So you latch onto the next reasonable thing only to find again and again that that which you seek is not even there to begin with.
That thematic element, the senselessness of everything mixed with the certainty to struggle to make sense anyway, pervades the story and several of the points of view therein. The structure lends itself to this theme, and Olsen really lets loose as the novel progresses. The structure begins to crumble, it collapses in on itself, and eventually falls to a crumpled mess on the floor of the final page. It is beautiful. It is haunting. It is elegant. It is profane. It is timely. It is timeless.
This is the experimental novel I've been wanting to read without knowing it. I'm glad it serendipitously made its way into my hands, and I'm even gladder to have made the choice to read it. 5/5 from me. Hands down.
At its basic level, it is structured like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, with the narrative torch passing from one point of view to the next as each character crosses paths with one another. You never know who the next person will be, and the chapter/section titles never provide predictive information. The whole thing is like a continuous red herring, where you think you might know where it is going, but it instead makes a turn and leaves you fumbling for meaning. So you latch onto the next reasonable thing only to find again and again that that which you seek is not even there to begin with.
That thematic element, the senselessness of everything mixed with the certainty to struggle to make sense anyway, pervades the story and several of the points of view therein. The structure lends itself to this theme, and Olsen really lets loose as the novel progresses. The structure begins to crumble, it collapses in on itself, and eventually falls to a crumpled mess on the floor of the final page. It is beautiful. It is haunting. It is elegant. It is profane. It is timely. It is timeless.
This is the experimental novel I've been wanting to read without knowing it. I'm glad it serendipitously made its way into my hands, and I'm even gladder to have made the choice to read it. 5/5 from me. Hands down.
March 2, 2020
I must say, ‘My Red Heaven’ is one of the best books I have read in a long time! This novel depicts a single day, June 10, 1927, in Berlin, Germany. As you no doubt know, 1927 was a period of great tumult in Germany, less than 10 past the end of The Great War, and 6 years before Hitler became chancellor. But what amazed me was how Olsen used a polyphonic collage-like style to shift perspective between many different characters, most of whom were real-life persons. Short chapters hand the narrative off from one perspective to another (and a couple are animals, rather than people), and the style of each section brings to life certain aspects of that character. This experimental polyvalent style uniquely bonds form and content in a fresh way that I found intellectually and aesthetically exciting.
February 24, 2020
The type of writing that makes you want to write. The type of author you read and believe is much more brilliant, focused, and painstakingly assiduous than you can really even understand.
January 19, 2020
'Otto found that moment's ordinariness stunning.'
Lance Olsen's new novel takes place over one day - June 10th, 1927 - in Berlin. As the day progresses we get a glimpse of the lives of those who live there, the famous and the everyday normal people, artists and truck drivers. He uses a variety of styles and techniques: stream of consciousness, transcripts of newsreels and play scripts, poems, photographs, which culminate in the final paragraph being superimposed upon itself over and over, turned and repeated, until the text becomes just a black mess.
Like a camera panning over the city, we get a glimpse of an extraordinary moment, in that this is a still point between two other extraordinary moments. All of the characters that we meet have either been affected by the previous war, or will be affected by the upcoming war. The narrative frequently jumps back and forward in time to allow the reader to learn the fate or the history of a character. These moments of ordinary 1927 become fragile, transient, impossible to hold on to.
The overall effect of the book is a stunning exploration of art, literature, science and politics. As the characters interact or glimpse each other in passing, we get a sense of a vibrant and open city, a cultural and sexual hedonism that is at its peak. The prose is wonderfully lyrical and exact, and Olsen draws on so many 'real' characters that a reader might find themselves frantically trying to figure out who they are. This is a textured, indeed abstract, novel, taking its inspiration from Otto Freundlich's 1933 abstract painting 'Mein roter Himmel'. As Olsen adds on each layer the overall panorama of the book reaches its conclusion in an extraordinary final chapter. This is a remarkable and cultured book, that will reward a second and third reading. Definitely a strongly recommended 4.5 stars.
Lance Olsen's new novel takes place over one day - June 10th, 1927 - in Berlin. As the day progresses we get a glimpse of the lives of those who live there, the famous and the everyday normal people, artists and truck drivers. He uses a variety of styles and techniques: stream of consciousness, transcripts of newsreels and play scripts, poems, photographs, which culminate in the final paragraph being superimposed upon itself over and over, turned and repeated, until the text becomes just a black mess.
Like a camera panning over the city, we get a glimpse of an extraordinary moment, in that this is a still point between two other extraordinary moments. All of the characters that we meet have either been affected by the previous war, or will be affected by the upcoming war. The narrative frequently jumps back and forward in time to allow the reader to learn the fate or the history of a character. These moments of ordinary 1927 become fragile, transient, impossible to hold on to.
The overall effect of the book is a stunning exploration of art, literature, science and politics. As the characters interact or glimpse each other in passing, we get a sense of a vibrant and open city, a cultural and sexual hedonism that is at its peak. The prose is wonderfully lyrical and exact, and Olsen draws on so many 'real' characters that a reader might find themselves frantically trying to figure out who they are. This is a textured, indeed abstract, novel, taking its inspiration from Otto Freundlich's 1933 abstract painting 'Mein roter Himmel'. As Olsen adds on each layer the overall panorama of the book reaches its conclusion in an extraordinary final chapter. This is a remarkable and cultured book, that will reward a second and third reading. Definitely a strongly recommended 4.5 stars.
February 14, 2023
The moment in which you awaken is on fire. You are alive or the other thing, falling to scorched earth or ascending to the rooftops of Berlin, a radiantly red heaven. You feel yourself besieged, swirling inside one startling sensibility and then another, deliriums of joy pierced by devastations of loss and sorrow—a Doberman named Delia bounds for birds as a man compels himself to paint yet another murdered woman. Infinitely prismatic, your consciousness refracts, amplifies sensation: you want others to feel the same light streaking toward them as you do. A bear occurs, a man playing a flute followed by twenty otherworldly children; you see the world as an ant, a blue butterfly, as the moon sees it. Your old self softens and you evanesce: not one, but many. You have stayed awake all night living inside My Red Heaven. Now all you want to do is sleep. A woman dressed in flames offers chloroform and ether stirred in a porcelain bowl. Petals of a white rose open like lotus flowers. You breathe yourself into a bliss of clouds, pink and coral, one miracle followed by another miracle and then another, remembering the woman young and beautiful, not wasted thin, skin not ravaged. Someone very close whispers: Don’t worry at all. I can feel it. Everything’s going to be all—
It’s true, everything is all: the world explodes and unexplodes. You waken into another twilight, not knowing how long you’ve slept, if it is morning or dusk, if moments or a day or decades have passed—you touch your face with your fingers, uncertain if you are alive or the other thing. Somewhere deep within this miraculous sleep you have seen skulls coming apart, flesh on fire, the sacred mess inside—those who witness murder commit murder. You crawled through narrow passage after narrow passage in a bombed-out house that proliferated to become the universe. An incinerated corpse with a shattered jaw tried to tell you what had happened. You want to paint the world, now, just as you’ve seen it, unbearably bright, in all its annihilating intensity—you want to inscribe the canvas beneath the paint, to pull the perfect words and then the perfect colors from the broken bones and burning flesh of your own body.
Art doesn’t help. Art doesn’t make life more bearable or longer or impervious to anguish. Its real goal is the opposite: to teach us nobody can be saved, to prove again and again we are gorgeous failures, damage calendars. We suffer, believing we are alive, but with his exquisitely sharp blade, the executioner Wang Lun has already cut us clean from injury and illness, Wan Lun has restored us, yes, delivered us to the elemental. We rise, attending to the city below. Silvery afternoon light makes the tiny people in the park sparkle, enchanting old men to sprites, scintillating children to glitters.
The freakish thing isn’t that we die, but that anyone is left alive. Yes, we are alive, dangerously sentient, the day on fire—even to the last gasp we insist on love—its obliterating pleasures, everything we’ve ever felt distilled into one piercing moment. Through the minds and bodies of multitudes, we awaken desperately in love with every blessed being, the sacred mess inside, this transient holy moment. Walter Benjamin sees a bear, a man dying in the street, silvery light, his lover Asja’s lovely body, feels as we do a double enlivening, the political and the erotic slurred into a single unfathomableness. Greta Garbo remembers not her fame, but her failures, her father’s lesson, those malevolent stoves in that fairytale, the blind masses shoveling in their burning hearts which flare into flame then belch back as black smoke that keeps them blind—knows now not the beauty of her face, but the wreck, the rot her body has become. Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les bêtes l’ont mange. Billy Wilder joyfully contemplates treating himself to Emilie, his favorite transvestite—he likes it hot, bewildering. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger search for mushrooms and become voyeurs as they follow two young lovers deep into the Düppeler Forest—the forest that provides the wood for the axe that will chop it down. Sculpting one pietà and then another, Käthe Kollwtiz feels the impossible weight of her son in her arms, the miracle of breath, the failure to revive him. The forest floor dissolves and the world unveils itself, a Dadaist montage. Here, beyond time, Dora Diamant falls out of love with Franz Kafka even as he falls into the most immaculate love of his life, composing letters from a doll to the child who’s lost her.
You feel the rage and grief of Erich Köhler walking through the world in his smashed body—the wonder of Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Severing, Niels Bohr, Vladimir Nabokov—the joy of Delia bounding for birds in a perfect dream of her perfected self—you know the secrets of Elise Lemme, Otto Hampel, Adolf Hitler, Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Goebbels—
You burn: forever in flames with Magda Müller—
You love a man without a face, despising yourself for your helplessness—
You become Rosa Luxemburg, a child of five, crippled by a tubercular hip, mocked by her father—Rosa five decades later learning that the most revolutionary thing a person can do is simply say aloud what is happening in the vicinity of her life—beautiful Rosa liberated from her battered body, rising as a blue butterfly, watching from above as two goons grab what she has once been by its feet—
You stroll crowded streets with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, hearing twelve tones, voices intertwined, everything on earth singing. Music and love play the body like an instrument. Arnold says he doesn’t want to be an emotional plagiarist, doesn’t want to steal other people’s tenderness or hurt and absorb it into his own until he can’t remember whether it’s his or not. But the warning comes too late for you, always too late—because there are more, still more, always more to love, to become: everyone here and gone, blue smoke, blue angels: please, just get me home, bury the thing of me—
Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich’s abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment.
It’s true, everything is all: the world explodes and unexplodes. You waken into another twilight, not knowing how long you’ve slept, if it is morning or dusk, if moments or a day or decades have passed—you touch your face with your fingers, uncertain if you are alive or the other thing. Somewhere deep within this miraculous sleep you have seen skulls coming apart, flesh on fire, the sacred mess inside—those who witness murder commit murder. You crawled through narrow passage after narrow passage in a bombed-out house that proliferated to become the universe. An incinerated corpse with a shattered jaw tried to tell you what had happened. You want to paint the world, now, just as you’ve seen it, unbearably bright, in all its annihilating intensity—you want to inscribe the canvas beneath the paint, to pull the perfect words and then the perfect colors from the broken bones and burning flesh of your own body.
Art doesn’t help. Art doesn’t make life more bearable or longer or impervious to anguish. Its real goal is the opposite: to teach us nobody can be saved, to prove again and again we are gorgeous failures, damage calendars. We suffer, believing we are alive, but with his exquisitely sharp blade, the executioner Wang Lun has already cut us clean from injury and illness, Wan Lun has restored us, yes, delivered us to the elemental. We rise, attending to the city below. Silvery afternoon light makes the tiny people in the park sparkle, enchanting old men to sprites, scintillating children to glitters.
The freakish thing isn’t that we die, but that anyone is left alive. Yes, we are alive, dangerously sentient, the day on fire—even to the last gasp we insist on love—its obliterating pleasures, everything we’ve ever felt distilled into one piercing moment. Through the minds and bodies of multitudes, we awaken desperately in love with every blessed being, the sacred mess inside, this transient holy moment. Walter Benjamin sees a bear, a man dying in the street, silvery light, his lover Asja’s lovely body, feels as we do a double enlivening, the political and the erotic slurred into a single unfathomableness. Greta Garbo remembers not her fame, but her failures, her father’s lesson, those malevolent stoves in that fairytale, the blind masses shoveling in their burning hearts which flare into flame then belch back as black smoke that keeps them blind—knows now not the beauty of her face, but the wreck, the rot her body has become. Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les bêtes l’ont mange. Billy Wilder joyfully contemplates treating himself to Emilie, his favorite transvestite—he likes it hot, bewildering. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger search for mushrooms and become voyeurs as they follow two young lovers deep into the Düppeler Forest—the forest that provides the wood for the axe that will chop it down. Sculpting one pietà and then another, Käthe Kollwtiz feels the impossible weight of her son in her arms, the miracle of breath, the failure to revive him. The forest floor dissolves and the world unveils itself, a Dadaist montage. Here, beyond time, Dora Diamant falls out of love with Franz Kafka even as he falls into the most immaculate love of his life, composing letters from a doll to the child who’s lost her.
You feel the rage and grief of Erich Köhler walking through the world in his smashed body—the wonder of Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Severing, Niels Bohr, Vladimir Nabokov—the joy of Delia bounding for birds in a perfect dream of her perfected self—you know the secrets of Elise Lemme, Otto Hampel, Adolf Hitler, Marlene Dietrich, Joseph Goebbels—
You burn: forever in flames with Magda Müller—
You love a man without a face, despising yourself for your helplessness—
You become Rosa Luxemburg, a child of five, crippled by a tubercular hip, mocked by her father—Rosa five decades later learning that the most revolutionary thing a person can do is simply say aloud what is happening in the vicinity of her life—beautiful Rosa liberated from her battered body, rising as a blue butterfly, watching from above as two goons grab what she has once been by its feet—
You stroll crowded streets with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, hearing twelve tones, voices intertwined, everything on earth singing. Music and love play the body like an instrument. Arnold says he doesn’t want to be an emotional plagiarist, doesn’t want to steal other people’s tenderness or hurt and absorb it into his own until he can’t remember whether it’s his or not. But the warning comes too late for you, always too late—because there are more, still more, always more to love, to become: everyone here and gone, blue smoke, blue angels: please, just get me home, bury the thing of me—
Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven, Otto Freundlich’s abstract cubist painting, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint, turning his fiercely attentive, unbounded love to every being in every moment, exposing infinite unknown dimensions, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment.
November 22, 2023
Olsen has crafted a fiction using multiple voices (some based on historical figures, other fictional) set on a single day in Berlin in 1927 during the Weimar Republic.
He uses various "experimental" techniques such as cutups and stream of consciousness to evoke an era before the Nazis took power but by looking both forward and backwards in time giving a sense of the doom that was to come.
Highly recommended
He uses various "experimental" techniques such as cutups and stream of consciousness to evoke an era before the Nazis took power but by looking both forward and backwards in time giving a sense of the doom that was to come.
Highly recommended
February 27, 2026
We need more books like this - smart, but with heart, intriguing idea, well executed, stays close to the form but not slavishly.
Just really well don't and (sigh) the story of one day 100 years ago is finding more resonances with today as it should be comfortable to anybody.
My only gripe is the disintegration towards the end... in this case I'd have preferred a more standard landing at the risk of slight cheessiness.
Very recommended.
Just really well don't and (sigh) the story of one day 100 years ago is finding more resonances with today as it should be comfortable to anybody.
My only gripe is the disintegration towards the end... in this case I'd have preferred a more standard landing at the risk of slight cheessiness.
Very recommended.
July 6, 2020
Loved the innovative format of this book, and since I'm quite familiar with the time and place, it felt like reading inside jokes or seeing old friends pop up. I imagine some of the backstory might go over the heads of readers, but if you're interested in the Weimar Republic era, this is a great snapshot.
July 21, 2024
A modernist fever dream of Berlin in 1927. The back cover lauds is innovative techniques, but it mostly feels familiar to me. I'm glad Olsen took his fodder for literary models instead of mere subjects, and I'm grateful for the candor.
June 24, 2020
interesting and often very pretty, as a death
March 30, 2023
Absolute madness
June 1, 2023
Five stars for sure.
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