Berlin Atomized

September 16, 2024
Argentine writer Kornberg debuts with an evocative portrait of disaffected youth and an unsettling, war-torn near future. In early aughts Buenos Aires, the Goldstein siblings—Nina, Jeremías, and Mateo—and their peers experiment with sex and drugs and sleep “the least deserved siestas in the world.” Yet each sibling harbors “a simmering death wish,” which takes them to new lives and locales—Jeremías is drawn into the music world, and eventually to Europe; Mateo disappears to a kibbutz in Israel and then joins the Israel Defense Forces; and Nina whiles away her life, trying to make art and fill a void left by her brothers. The novel extends to the 2060s, chronicling a new European war and revolutions in both politics and art. Kornberg is better at detailing the lives of bored elites than constructing the speculative elements, and the novel loses some of its spark as the core sibling relationships expand to include flatly drawn lovers, friends, and collaborators. The novel’s strongest section takes place after a young Nina and Jeremías escape Buenos Aires for Punta del Este, Uruguay, where “nights didn’t feel like a competition of who could come home the latest.” Readers will look forward to seeing what Kornberg does next.

Starred review from October 1, 2024
Three siblings from Buenos Aires weather the eventful unfolding of the 21st century. Kornberg's debut novel, which she stylishly co-translates from Spanish with Rockwell, is presented as a collection of diaristic writings assembled and edited in 2063 by a childhood friend of the Goldstein family. It begins in Buenos Aires, with Nina Goldstein: "If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009. With a time machine, a photo lost to the internet, a Daft Punk record." Nina and her older brothers, Mateo and Jerem�as, grow up in a gated community north of Buenos Aires with scant parental involvement. The music scene of the period, including the Croma��n nightclub fire of 2004, is a backdrop to their coming of age, presaging future tragedies and two of the siblings' careers in the arts. As Jerem�as comments, "Want to destroy your friendships? Form a band. Want to destroy a band? Give its members time, feed them candy, coke, ideological warfare, propaganda, fascism." As the book hopscotches forward in time, settings include Uruguay, Paris, Berlin, Gaza, Brussels, and Tokyo, all in various dystopian iterations--Paris is the epicenter of a bloody hacker-driven revolution in a not-far-off future. Though their family is geographically scattered and one of them dies young, the Goldstein siblings remain crucially connected, retaining in their orbit longtime friends and romantic partners, a redefined version of dysfunctional family more lasting than anything else in Kornberg's atomized landscape. Capturing a lost generation that feels both timeless and particular in its ironic fatalism and its various intellectual, artistic, and political responses to a broken world, this novel will be of interest to the international literary community. A striking debut from a new global voice.

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