The Undercurrents

Starred review from June 15, 2022
An enthralling book about how finding the truth of a city's story means finding the truth of your own. Bell, a British American art critic, has lived in Berlin long enough to feel "the undercurrents and the downward pull that seem inseparable from Berlin's identity." In this nuanced, layered narrative, she effectively describes that sensation, creating a complex hybrid of the past and present, framed by the history of the "aggravating and interfering" apartment where she lives--in a neighborhood that has been home to artists and Nazis, entrepreneurs and orphans. "I set myself the task," she notes, "of writing a portrait of the city....The memory of a place does not lie flat on a straight line of time; it is syncretic and simultaneous, layered in thin sediments of event and passage, inhabitation and mood. Walking around Berlin, she has discovered constant reminders--some deliberate, some not--of the rise of the Reich, the arrival and devastation of the war, and the city's Cold War division. At the same time, Bell examines the difficulties in her own life. This sense of jumping between themes could have resulted in a tangle of confusion, but the author skillfully weaves the narrative threads into an elegant tapestry. Everything she encounters in the city seems to evoke something else. There are connections between the political and the personal, the beautiful and the obscene, the freedom and the self-repression. Bell wonders if the unification of the two parts of Germany, with East Germany being written out of history by a triumphant West, was an unalloyed positive development for Berlin. She sees a city that has become a maze of aggressive architecture and a culture obsessed with housing costs and property speculation. The author ends with a gesture of ambivalence, with Bell deciding to leave her apartment for somewhere "more manageable and less temperamental." It's an odd but strangely fitting coda. A remarkably absorbing work that requires close attention--and repays in full.

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August 1, 2022
Art critic Bell (The Artist’s House) mesmerizes with this intimate, curious memoir of Berlin, where she’s lived for two decades since arriving as a student in 2001. Soon after Bell and her family found a new home in 2014 on the Landwehr Canal, the once glorious, now decaying 19th-century apartment (and its frequent leaks) became a symbol of her own crumbling marriage: “Well-kept secrets rose up.... Damp bruises of distrust and neglect became suddenly visible. Welled resentments burst their banks.” Perpetually fascinated by the city’s architecture, she fixated on learning more about the mechanics and history of the building, consulting a feng shui master, city archives, and “literature from a century ago that took place in the streets around.” She also questions how the landscape shaped the culture and history of the city as she employs it as metaphor for her marital and other life struggles: “Berlin’s sandy floor, this soft and porous medium, exerts a constant, subtle downward pull. Does this explain the strange lethargy that sometimes hangs across the city?” Berlin’s literary heritage, from Walter Benjamin to Christopher Isherwood, gets documented alongside its tumultuous history. In enumerating the atrocities of WWII, perspective is gained: “How can I lay my life’s petty derailments and coincidental geographies alongside a violation of this scale?” It’s a transfixing cultural topography that will appeal to readers of Rebecca Solnit. Agent: Nina Sillem, Nina Sillem Agency.