Sarah Wrote That

Richard Powers in Design Observer’s Places section:

I don’t know why we humans are forever confusing a stranger’s c.v. with statistical proof, or seeing some invented character’s choice as the world’s tie-breaking vote. It’s some fluke in the way we’re wired: only the personal story is real. But personally speaking, I’d say that the trait is the strangest, saddest, scariest, and most exploitable fact about us.

Long, sad, wonderful reflection on history, fiction, Berlin, and Europe then and now.

Amelia Atlas reviews three newish Berlin novels:

It is easy, in Berlin, to find oneself in the grip of an uncommon inertia. The city’s topography, at once absorbing and alienating, makes for a distracting plaything. It’s hard to capture the physical strangeness of Berlin, but I’m confident that it’s the only cosmopolitan European capital where you can get lost in a sandpit for several blocks in the middle of the city on the way to a party. This bizarre openness—the feeling of expansive space in an urban environment—has the additional effect of distending time. There is none of the compressed bustle that keeps a city like New York moving forward.

Read the first chapter of Chloe Aridjis’s Book Of Clouds.

18 Jun 2010 13:10

Sarah Wrote That

What Does Fiction Know? →