Description

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A kinetic, globetrotting novel following three siblings—Jewish and downwardly mobile—from 2001 to 2034, as they come of age against the major crises of the 21st century.

First published in Argentina and co-translated by the wunderkind author herself, this debut novel is for readers of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X meets Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus.

Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervor and repeating: "I am not asleep". She grows up amid the partying and undeserved siestas, the papier-mâché revolutions of youth, while her eldest brother Jeremías is drawn into the city's powder keg music scene, and the middle sibling, Mateo, learns of his terminal illness and prepares to join the Israeli Defense Force. Though their country faces the worst economic crisis in its history, the Goldsteins are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working class families from their suburban town. Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater, the family scattered all over the earth.

The second half of the novel takes place between 2018 and 2035, invoking and imagining possible futures for this existence in migration. Jeremías lives in Paris until an unspoken war destroys the city in a terrorist attack, and Nina, after tracing their brother Mateo's last steps to his death in Tel Aviv, ends up in Berlin, where the European Union is found in the shambles of its own history. From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin to Jerusalem, Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another.

Defiant and dexterous, percussive and percolating with violent light, Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg’s Napalm-ic debut—a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised.

About the Author

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Julia Kornberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1996. A fiction writer in Spanish, she also writes literary criticism in English and has work published or forthcoming in Bookforum, The New York Review of Books, The Drift, The Baffler, and other publications. Her first novel, Atomizado Berlín, was published in Mexico and Argentina in 2021. She splits her time between New York City and Buenos Aires and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University.