Impossible Familiar: On Julia Kornberg’s “Berlin Atomized”
Julia Kornberg, transl. Jack Rockwell | Berlin Atomized | Astra House | December 2024 | 240 Pages
According to some interpretations of Vedic cosmology, our solar system has reached its fourth and final age. We’ll experience gradual decline in the form of social alienation, natural disasters, ill health, atheism, and so on until the destruction of all of it after 51,840 years. And with a new cycle comes a Golden Age, where gods walk among men. My life changed a little when I learned about Kali Yuga at age eighteen, because I now had in my pocket the belief that the despair would and in fact must eventually let up. How to not suffer while still worldly attached, I do not know. But this strain of not-exactly-nihilism is in many ways a boon. It is present in the novel Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, in which three siblings hang out across the world in a near-apocalyptic slacker story that has the guts to describe atrocity with style.
The fictional conceit is that a friend of the Goldsteins—a bourgeois, Argentine, Jewish family—has discovered, amid late-stage climate catastrophe in the year 2063, a trove of correspondence and journal entries belonging to the siblings that span the years 2004 to 2034. The narrative perspective—written as though the speaker is addressing a recipient they know they’ll never actually reach—switches often. After we first meet fourteen-year-old Nina in the wealthy Buenos Aires suburb of Nordelta, her brothers burst in from the places they disappeared to. The handsome middle child, Jeremias, climbs out from the pit of bodies at the punk show in the city center. The mysterious and ill-fated eldest, Mateo, a hermit who still attracts beautiful women, boards a plane to Israel and spends his last living days posing for pictures with Hamas men cut in half, in the hell that is the bombed Gaza Strip. The Berlin part comes later, when the EU dissolves.
Berlin Atomized indeed explodes. Something is cracked open, and look, there: many more structural and linguistic possibilities than the shelves of contemporary bildungsromans by a disaffected monoglots would lead you to believe. Kornberg does what Nina ponders: “I thought about what it might be like to write if things were different, if there were no such word in the world as girlie.” In the book’s original language, there is no girlie; it’s minita.
Kornberg, a PhD candidate in translation theory at Princeton, is, at twenty-eight years old, an intimidatingly sharp creative and intellectual talent. In December, Astra House published the English edition of her debut novel, a decades-spanning and continent-hopping quest for art, autonomy, and love. There have been many versions. In 2016, Kornberg conceived of a book of Spanish-language short stories that the judges of a regional writing contest encouraged her to rework into a novel; that text became Atomizado Berlín, published in 2021. Between 2020 and 2024, she and collaborator Jack Rockwell co-translated the text that would become Berlin Atomized. The changes made in the English-language book have since been re-translated into the Spanish.
This head-spinning trajectory reflects a philosophy of translation where processes that appear deliberately non-linear and inefficient are a means to more beautiful ends. In a recent book on the art form, Damion Searls, Jon Fosse’s translator, describes his work “as something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options.” We should not overemphasize the fraught notion of accuracy, he cautions. We must reject the concept of foreignness, and “rather than beginning from an assumption of two separated contexts, we should view the translator as someone in a diverse community who reads a text in one language and produces a text in a different language.”
The infinite linguistic choices a writer makes must be considered anew in the process of translation, and weighed in relation to the original. What Searls argues for, and what Kornberg practices, is treating the progression of choices as an artistic process. Many a professor will tell you “there are no rules in writing” (probably in the same lecture where they read out their list of rules) and the same can be said for translation. Instead of rules, Searls suggests, there are decisions.
The language of Berlin Atomized feels carefully chosen—not in a pedantically laborious sense, because the prose is often quick and sly, but in a way that makes me feel cared for, as the reader. This might mean attention to fact. Kornberg said in an interview that she and Rockwell argued for weeks about the appropriate measure of marijuana that a character would smoke, whether Americans would understand the slang term for twenty-five grams and if a veinticinco would make him too high.
Then there is the dedication to the story’s “truth content,” which, deeper than dosage accuracy, is the truth of a feeling as revealed through aesthetics, which requires a writer’s belief in cadence and rhythm to get us there, to even lead the way. “In Spanish, you can kind of write whatever you want, and if it sounds nice, that’s okay: the prose redeems it,” Kornberg tells Rockwell in a conversation published in Latin American Literature Today.
When I write in Spanish I really take advantage of this—one of my mentors once told me I write ‘by ear,’ sounding out the words, because I care more about how the sentence looks and sounds than whether it makes sense or not… But luckily English is not at all like that, it is a language where meaning matters a little bit more, and if you don’t make sense you end up looking foolish.
Kornberg balances the meaning-making and her obvious fascination with language. She writes scenes more than she builds characters, giving us the quick and dirty so she can stew in her descriptions of heat or a lonely rush hour subway ride or the living room TV playing ’90s medical dramas on loop.
Berlin Atomized begins in the summer of 2009 with a sleepy, dreamy Nina Goldstein baptizing herself “all day, every day.” After fucking a tennis coach from the south on the golf course in her northern neighborhood, she returned home and completed a ritual in order to wipe the traces of sex. She bathed three times, laundered or occasionally burned her clothes, and covered her body “in moisturizer and sunblock, in order to smell like something else.”
She covered her body in sunblock. A deliciously chunky word. Why didn’t Kornberg write—or why didn’t she translate protector solar as—“sunscreen,” the more popular way to refer to a cream that protects against UV? Despite basically synonymous dictionary definitions, the two words feel markedly different. And it is how they feel; “sunblock” feels like the rolls of pudgy baby tummy skin turned lobster red, scratching against a poolside condo’s polyester sheets. “Sunscreen” is thinner and sleeker, belonging to the mirrored gallery of a department store blasting AC in a heatwave. That’s why she did it: because here, “sunblock” is exactly right.
When I ask Kornberg over email about the word, she isn’t sure in this case why she and Rockwell used it. It might be because “sunblock” was what appeared in the ESL manual Kornberg used in primary school, or because “it made more sense for Nina’s overall mental/physical isolation from the world outside.” It wasn’t the most intentional choice, she says: “A lot of translation is a crapshoot.”
How it reads is how it feels is how it is. Words create a world, and in this one, it could only ever be “sunblock.” Since 2011 the FDA has banned manufacturers from putting “sunblock” on labels, arguing that it offered consumers a false sense of security. The equivalent Argentine food-and-drug administration has no such ban. Still, “sunscreen” won out as the popular branding all over the world, following America’s suit. That little historical tidbit belies a whole geopolitical story concerned with the same things Kornberg constantly returns to: democracy, hegemony, and material culture and its exchange. Take, for instance, how she describes a party Nina attends: “Who knows what had led Buenos Aires’ ruling class to romanticize a shithole like this, as if through rustic photo ops they could escape their Brooklyn-style class guilt.” Rich leftists here, there, and everywhere; next let’s hit the French-language graffiti tour in Bushwick.
Kornberg has written about the “translation trap” Latin American writers experience when they enter an international market that expects them to conform to an aesthetic that made the authors of the Latin American Boom so successful, i.e. its association with magical realism and working-class identities. Authors bend to “appease liberal gringo institutions” that want no real political complexity but still value the cool factor of reading about the Third World. She identifies Jorge Luis Borges as a model for the way out. In his lecture “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” he encouraged his fellow Argentine writers to not define themselves by their “Latin-Americanness,” considering the idea an arbitrary modern invention. Even in this opened up space, he said, it would still be Argentine writing, just without the “gauchos, guitars, and maté” that confirm Western prejudices. In her novel, Kornberg swims in that opened space. She suggests a complication inherent in being Argentine, and she refuses to make that simpler or more palatable to an American reader. What’s a border, when a kid on holiday in Punta del Este, Uruguay dresses like “one of the aunts from Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” listens to Hare Krishna mantras and Madonna.
It’s a rite of class ascendancy in Argentina to leave and live abroad, and the Goldsteins embody the loneliness of “passing” pretty much everywhere while fitting in nowhere. They are certainly not at home in Nordelta, a place without history. The gated development emerged out of the countryside in the 2000s, butting up against areas of extreme poverty and atop the wetlands previously inhabited by snakes and capybaras. Kornberg explains in an interview with Full Stop that “more than actors, [the siblings] are spectators of the crumbling world around them, and that was a really fun position for me to portray (not to mention one with which I identify).”
Berlin Atomized achieves the sublime sensation of experiencing an odd, maybe impossible version of the very familiar, possible because of Kornberg’s confidence in the internal logic of her narrative. Sometime in the 2030s, Nina documents detention camps in Normandy by going “undercover at an ineffectual NGO that seemed to protect the environment by organizing corny raves musicalized by R&B songs—the kind of cheugy non-profit that talks a big talk about humanity, and borders, climate change, etc., etc.” (“Cheugy,” a borrowed word, appears in the original Atomizado Berlín.) Internet-inflected, meme-adjacent speech is often employed in casual conversation to signal coolness, while in this novel, as in others, it’s weaponized to describe dystopia. It’s speculation at its best: cultural cachet anchors us to familiar thoughts and feelings so the writer can go a little wild with the what-ifs. No, Islamic extremists did not shatter six of the panopticon windows of the Bibliotheque Nationale with hardcovers of Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq in the year 2024—but what an image Kornberg conjures.
I want to do a totally annoying Anglo critic thing and relate the Paris-set chapter of Berlin Atomized to a European work that precedes Kornberg, which is Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex trilogy (whose translator, Frank Wynne, won an award for his work translating Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires, sold in the UK as Atomised). Despentes depicts a fucked-up anti-utopia, and her critique of modern sensibility—our hypocritical violence, our smiling evil—skewers because all the icons are readily found in reality. How many novels climax with a fictional terrorist attack marginally worse than those we’ve already witnessed? I suspect the French authors can’t help themselves because the taboo is just so chic.
Kornberg carries on the tradition of exaggerating real social failures, and her only misstep might be an overabundance. Over just a few pages, she takes on the art-market irony when Nina is commissioned to make self-referential photo art about the detention camps, takes on misogyny when Nina’s abusive husband calls her work “cheap mysticism,” and takes on governmental suppression of political radicals by jailing the friend that Nina visits in order to escape said terrible husband.
Berlin Atomized is ultimately an uncontained explosion of language and ideas, occasionally messy and totally delightful. Kornberg began the writing at twenty years old, and through it runs a youthful sense of the unexpected and an urgency propelling discovery of whatever that is, plus a belief in bohemianism to sustain us through the horrors of a spiritually dark age. An apartment piled up with books and canvases; an obsession with an underground rapper, prophet of the resistance; a Bjork lookalike—these details transcend people and place, to embody the perspective of the girl at the end of the world.