3.5 stars (rounded up)

Content Warnings: racism, Nazism, suicide, islamophobia, violence, child abuse (mentioned)

1000 Coils of Fear is the English translation of Olivia Wenzel's debut novel about living as a mixed race Black German woman. Wenzel weaves through the life of our narrator - and her family history - recounting notable historical events alongside personal stories.

I found the format of this book fascinating. Much of the story is told in a Q&A style, and the reader is never 100% sure who our narrator is engaging in this Q&A with (herself, her alter ego, her dead twin brother, her therapist? All or none of the above?) but I really thought this was an effective way to tell such an exploratory story which is very self reflective. The novel is beautifully written - so much credit should go to both Wenzel as well as Priscilla Layne, the book's translator - there were numerous times where I was struck by the gorgeous prose. The themes of race, belonging, motherhood, and family are given great care in the story. I was very impressed as well by the way Wenzel weaves the story of one individual and her family into the story of the world history in which they have lived. My only issue with the novel was the stream-of-consciousness nature of the prose, which I often found a little difficult to follow, as our narrator is swept off on tangents and drawn back into her stories. But genuinely, I think this is much more an issue with me as a reader than any flaw in the book - I've only ever read a couple other books written in this style and I always struggle with it. I get the sense this might be a good book to revisit later if I ever get more familiar and comfortable with this style of storytelling!

“1000 Coils of Fear” written by Olivia Wenzel is a book about an unnamed black woman from Germany and it’s very good at presenting and showing the reality of being a black woman in today’s Germany. It discusses race, identity, and sexuality, and it’s a very powerful read. But unfortunately, it didn’t work for me as much as I thought and as much as I wanted to. The way this book is built and organized was a bit off for me, being framed as a long conversation at times it felt like I wasn't going to finish this book. I would’ve loved this book, I think it’s a great book with an important message but I feel like it maybe could’ve been organized differently, maybe with a chapter being narrated and the next one being a conversation. I got bored at some point with this whole discussion. It didn’t flow easily, on the contrary.

However, I would still recommend this book. I did enjoy it and I think it has an important message. I think if you liked Sally Rooney’s way of building and organizing her book, and the base of Girl, Woman, Other, you will most likely love this book too.

This book took ahold of me and refused to let me go. The story is told in an interesting way, all within in an interview with the narrator, but the purpose of the interview is unknown for most of the book and is very abstract. Interspersed with the transcripts are vignettes of the main character’s life and experience as a black woman living in modern day Germany. You might expect Europe to be incredibly progressive but that is not always the case. While she loves Germany (and is a citizen of it) she is often treated as a foreigner. This book discusses race, identity, belonging, and memory to incredible effect and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone.

This is a fantastic book that focuses on topics such as race, sexuality, feminism and so much more which makes for this to be a thought provoking and evocative read. I thought it was fantastic and incredibly relatable, possibly one of the best books I have read in a long time.

1000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel is an Outstanding and unique novel.
The unnamed narrator of this book has to deal with huge amount of things. From racism to the difficult relationship she has with her mother and other perosnal issues.
This is the story of a young black woman growing up in East Germany along with her mother and twin brother who then commits suicide when he was a teeanger. The narrator needs to deal with the death of her brother and its consequences and uneasy relationship with her mother, She faces racism everywhere, and if you don't face it in your life, makes you angry and makes you aware of this privileges of yours again.

Relatable, contemporary and timeless, Wenzel's novel is one of the most compelling stories I have read this year.

This was a great read - super easy and flowed so nicely. I raced through it which is always a good sign!

1,000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel is about a woman's complicated sense of who she is and where she belongs.

This is a bold experimental book that explores the impact of grief, racism, and imperfect female relationships on the burgeoning anxiety that threatens our unnamed Black female narrator. The whole book is framed as one long conversation between the protagonist and another unnamed person. This other voice morphs from what could be a character in dialogue with herself or even the author interrogating her character, to her dead brother, a friend, her mother. Sometimes it seems as if the book is actually taking place entirely within the narrator’s mind and we are looking out a window into the world.
I found it took me a while to get into the book. The vignettes of the narrator’s life were interesting, the imagery striking, the themes heavy but necessary, but the way the book flowed back and forth in time without signposts or any discernible forward thread was disconcerting. Also with the complex and deep topics covered, I longed for more breaks in the text to digest what I’d read. I found I could only read a small amount at a time and had to decide on my own ’chapters’ in order to stop and reflect. It’s not a book for those who want to be swept along by plot.
After a heartbreaking revelation at the end of part one it all started to come together a bit more. There were various threads interwoven, some to do with society and racism, some to do with the narrator’s relationships: those with her absent mother, her grandmother who has deep-rooted racist beliefs and loves but can never understand her, her ex-girlfriend who she clearly still has feelings for. I raced along through the second half, wanting to know how far she would get in overcoming her anxieties, and I found the ending satisfying but not too neat.
Ultimately, I’d recommend this to readers who like to explore flawed relationships in depth, and who want to find understanding, or see their own experiences reflected, around how it is to be the ‘other’ in a deeply unequal society.

Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I wanted to. The author had a brilliant idea but unfortunately the execution was a bit off for me. The writing style was a bit too convoluted and all over the place and while reading it, there wasn't a clear sense of direction, which ended up being quite frustrating. I'm extremely disappointed

Olivia Wenzel’s debut draws heavily on her own life, following an unnamed narrator whose mother was an East German punk and whose father returned to Angola before she was born. This complex, clever and thought-provoking novel is almost impossible to summarise. Much of it is made up of long passages of questions and answers in which we’re never entirely sure who the questioner is. It’s a structure that reflects the author’s experience as a dramatist but fans of linear narratives may find it a step too far. Wenzel explores identity, racism, the legacy of the old East Germany and family ties through a narrative which dips in and out of our narrator’s life, offering striking snapshots into which details are slipped, sometimes bringing her readers up short. Of course, we’re never sure of the reliability or otherwise of our narrator who occasionally pulls the carpet out from under her readers’ feet. By the end of the novel, many questions are left unanswered but the narrator has succeeded in loosening the grip of her anxiety, although the relentless racism will inevitably continue. A deeply unsettling, impressive novel that’s going to keep me thinking for some time to come

1000 Coils of Fear is a novel about an unnamed queer Black German woman, with an East German mother and an Angolan father, as she explores who she is in various situations and different locations, from rural Germany to New York City, Vietnam to her own bedroom. Told in various ways including a lot of question and answer sections, the book takes a non-linear approach to the narrator's life as it looks at the intersection of various elements in a person's life and the various selves someone has.

This book says a lot in a short space, with witty comments combining with personal confusion and the understanding that a person is not a coherent whole. The question and answer sections, resembling at times an immigration officer or Stasi interrogation, particularly get this across, using repetition, silence, and question avoidance to say a lot as well. However, I did find the format hard to read at times, as the voices morph and the scene changes without warning, and this did mean I found it hard to engage with the book at times. As the book is in translation, I wasn't sure if some of the parts might work better in German.

The exploration of place and self, especially in relation to race, community, and loneliness, was particularly interesting, and the book has lots to say. The almost plot-less journey through scenes and question and answers didn't quite work for me, but I'm sure plenty of people will find the structure more engaging.

Olivia Wenzel’s novel’s centred on a nameless woman, like Wenzel, she’s Black, German and queer. Her sense of who she is, or who she might become, is further complicated by her strained bonds with her white mother and grandmother who grew up in East Germany in the years before reunification. It’s a piece likely to be classed as autofiction, significant because that label emphasizes Wenzel’s desire not to be seen as speaking for all Black Germans here, she’s not writing to educate white people about racism in Germany, she’s probing the interplay of race, citizenship, class and queerness. Her choice of genre also foregrounds the blurring of boundaries between the actual Wenzel and the version/s of Wenzel inhabiting her writing.

She blends conventions from autofiction with an inventive range of forms and styles that emphasize her background as a musician and playwright. As a result, there’s often a strong oral quality to this, demonstrated through the intricate play of voices that surface throughout, reaching back into the past and forward into possible futures. She frequently wields a kind of skewed question-and-answer format that sometimes seems to stem from her central character’s inner conflict and deep-rooted anxieties, but at others overlaps with the various “interrogators” around her: from the relentless customs officials at an American airport to those white Germans whose gaze marks her as an outsider in her own country - there are echoes too of the infamous Stasi so central to her mother’s and grandmother’s formative years. This approach is disrupted by absurdist, surreal scenes linked to the narrator’s trauma and guilt over her twin brother’s death by suicide. But despite its weightier themes, I didn’t find this overwhelmingly downbeat, Wenzel’s narrator’s too resilient for that, and Wenzel’s adept at varying the mood, from angry to contemplative and essay-like to moments of biting comedy.

One of the many things I found striking about Wenzel’s novel’s her thoughtful examination of the shifting, fluid boundaries of self, feelings of fragmentation and conflict, particularly in relation to language, place and varying instances of power and privilege. The story inhabits a variety of spaces from Germany to Morocco to Poland, Vietnam and America, and in each location some aspect of the narrator’s identity moves from background to foreground or vice versa. At her grandmother’s home in Thuringia, notorious for extremist, racist attacks and a largescale AfD following, the narrator’s anxieties take over, forever the out-of-place Black child condemned to a state of hypervigilance. But, in New York she experiences herself as somehow able to be “blacker, briefly at home among a visible Black community, yet also estranged because of her vastly different Afropean history. In Morocco and Vietnam, she’s foremost a wealthy, exacting, German tourist; while in Poland she’s exempted by a fascist hunting party because her European passport singles her out from the refugees they despise. And her comparative affluence and global mobility give her a freedom that her white, working-class grandmother and troubled mother will never have. Wenzel also engages with the ongoing struggle to confront certain white perceptions of what forms of racism matter: one of the many things her character’s grappling with is a wider social assumption that only violent abuse or visible suffering at the hands of neo-Nazis counts, her exhaustion from years of everyday, “banal racism,” and sense of immobilising anxiety over what might happen, goes unrecognised.

There are some awkward, messy aspects, there’s a tendency - common to many first novels - to try to cram too much in, and there are times when Wenzel’s unusual framework doesn’t quite work. But overall, it’s a fascinating, insightful piece, drawing on a rich array of influences and concepts from American necropolitics to traditions of Black German literature pioneered by writers like May Ayim. But despite its unconventional structure and underlying complexity, it’s also a surprisingly accessible, compelling piece of storytelling. Translated by Priscilla Layne