American writer living in Germany. In her new novel Sister Europe, a literary award ceremony is celebrated in a Berlin hotel; we follow winner Masud, Demian, his trans daughter Nicole, prince Radi, grand dame Livia, dodgy publisher Toto and his internet-date The Flake.
SP
Sander here. I binged Sister Europe but it is a mess in my head, all the stories and characters. It’s because of how I read it: I received digital proofs and read them on my phone. Do you ever read on a phone or e-reader?
ps: I mean a good mess — the book is a delightful adventure!
NZ
It’s not a mess, so maybe you should read it on something larger. I sometimes read on a tablet, but only because some book I’m supposed to blurb is only available as a PDF. I don’t do it often.
SP
I am rereading it now: it is a weird process on a phone. Somehow the physical copy gives me a different experience, lets the story linger in my mind as a different whole. (Example: there’s this image of a woman made out of a flame in the book, and the image itself separates more from the book after I read it on my phone than it would when I’d had the physical copy in my hands.)
NZ
When I recall a passage in a printed book, I usually know how far along in the book I was, and on which side, and how far down. With eBooks, I get the feeling people lose track of the structure, because the plot elements aren’t tied to space but to an extremely vague virtual straight line.
SP
I am texting with author Vincenzo Latronico as well, about the different experience of feeds on a smartphone. His Perfection and your Sister Europe are two of the most excitingly contemporary novels I read, because they help me formulate some of my vague notions of the world around me. Both books are set in Berlin, and in both Europe is not only the old continent struggling with its colonial past, but there’s also the sense that American popular culture has lost its magic, or its hegemony is less self-evident. This passage for example: « ’Beef is trans,’ Toto said. ‘Think about it. They castrate them and put estrogen in the feed as a growth hormone, to fatten them up. Before they got burger joints in Germany, it was No Fat Chicks country — remember?’ »
NZ
Hmm… but Toto is American and 57.
SP
Americans are not banned from expressing or representing the decline of American cultural dominance.
NZ
But he says it’s rising, with the spread of burger places… or am I just confused?
SP
He is not exactly applauding it. Maybe my impression had more to do with an annoyance of decades of reading and consuming American culture: being part of it, but only on the consumer side. But you think that is just my reading? (When the father of a trans girl complains that she watches YouTube clips in English, and her therapist is based in the US, and that he wishes he’d married a German woman, I think of Big Tech and of the language around trans rights coming from the US.)
NZ
These characters are Americans skeptical of what they see as American culture, with an implicit understanding that all trends arise there — because when Americans rip off other people, nobody notices; it’s the American artifact that gets the press. Cultural studies was a UK thing (for example) but people blame US universities — and doesn’t all the tech secretly come from like Finland?
As Demian (I think) says, it was the French who pioneered feminising hormones in beef.
SP
I saw pictures of a tech exhibition in Lille that took place around 1989, they had their internet (Minitel or something) and I even saw a device called a tablet! And yes, Finland. It was start-up culture that smothered the European tech industry, I guess.
NZ
Yup
SP
Do you remember how this book started, as in: what was the idea and what brought you to it?
NZ
The first working title of all, before I started writing, was The Flake — the character who consists entirely of anecdotes, no « identity » (essence) but always manifested accidentally in time and space. Then I started writing and it immediately turned into something else. I wanted the quasi-Aristotelian unity of a single evening from the start, mostly to situate it in time and space — because these days you can’t set novels « oh, I dunno, maybe next year sometime, » as was the still case until fairly recently.
SP
What were the most unexpected thoughts or images the writing process brought you?
NZ
I didn’t realise what a central role Nicole was going to play — as an unformed young person she’s vulnerable to projection from all sides. It makes her a symbol of human freedom for the other characters, but in five different ways. I wanted ambiguity and I got it! Livia is herself ambiguous but that ambiguity ends up being more of a power move.
