The first quote on the (beautifully designed) dust cover of The Artificial Silk Girl goes like this: “[this book] reads like Bridget Jones’s Diary as rewritten by Berthold Brecht.” Further down, another quote says that it “[recalls] the greatest work of Alfred Döblin and Robert Musil [about] people on the edge of a destruction that they themselves cannot imagine.” But for heaven’s sake don’t them put you off. I have no idea why you’d market a book in such a ridiculous way.
The Artificial Silk Girl shares almost nothing with Musil’s greatest work, The Man Without Qualities except the language it is written in. Döblin’s great work is Berlin Alexanderplatz which is highly experimental and difficult. This is neither of those things.
Absurd bumpf aside, this is a riot of a book, told in a wonderfully flippant, callous, throaty tone. You imagine that Doris, the protagonist, has a mesmerisingly sexy speaking voice. Her sexual allure is never far from the front of our minds as she lurches from one disastrous situation to the next.
The novel is told in the first person and follows Doris through early 1930’s Berlin. To me, her narrative has more in common for the caricatures of Georg Grosz than any of the writers mentioned in the blurb. Here’s an example, in which Doris is thinking about a man called Armin who has given her a box of chocolates:
“I actually hate that name, because they once used it in a magazine commercial for a laxative.
And every time he got up from the table, I had to think: Armin, did you take Laxin this morning? And I had this idiotic laugh and he would ask ‘Why do laugh this silvery laugh, you sweet creature?’
And me: ‘I’m laughing because I’m happy.’
Thank God men are so full of themselves to think that you could be laughing at them!”
Because of the careless tone of Doris’s voice, it’s easy to overlook the skill with which this novel was written. It is wonderfully atmospheric and particularly evocative of the late Weimar Republic. The translation is a new one, although not entirely successful: there are far too many modern phrases and Americanisms. I fear that this is from a desire to popularise it, or to make it seem more relevant rather than out of any desire to make it feel racy or contemporary, which it certainly must have been when it was published. No wonder the Nazis banned it.
Musil it might not be, but I heartily recommend The Artificial Silk Girl to everyone.
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