“There was nothing,” Argentinian author and critic Julia Kornberg writes in Berlin Atomized, “more photogenic than a place like Europe as it was here and now, so engulfed in flames.”
Her novel, originally published in Spanish, turns up the heat gradually, beginning while the three Goldstein siblings are languishing in relatable teenagedom in a gated neighbourhood of Buenos Aires: Nina is taking aggressively long baths, Jeremías is getting into the music scene, and distant, doomed Mateo is burning aluminium trash cans. Far more interesting, though, is when the book pushes into their adulthood, past the present and into a darkly dystopian near future.
The EU has dissolved, a group known as New Resistance is bombing Paris, and the siblings are figuring out exactly where they fit into the global class war. Kornberg’s imaginative scope is wide; the book travels from Argentina to Uruguay, Israel to Paris, Berlin to Tokyo, feeling prescient at each stop. While exposition is doled out economically, the prose is exceptionally sharp. The Goldsteins inhabit an apocalypse that feels both familiar – the characters drink mate and complain about VAR in televised football; in Berlin, “the Volksbühne kept its regular show” – and lying in wait.
It’s the end of the world, and Kornberg’s electrified debut seems to hold with those who favour fire (with a side of flip-phone warfare).
