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

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

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.

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

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

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.

It took me a while to get into this novel due to its unusual style but there’s a revelation a third of the way through that really changed my experience of what I’d read thus far and which gives important context to what had gone before. I raced through the rest or get novel after that but I think a bit of perseverance is required to get to that point. I also thought this was a very good translation and almost never didn’t sound like I was reading it in its native language, which is a huge achievement. Recommended and thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This book is one filled with thoughts and views on multiculturalism. The narrator is black, comes from East Germany and her mother is white. Her father is Angolan and has absconded his responsibilities at an early age in her development and yet the narrator seems to hold no animosity towards him, only her mother.
She is bisexual and has a girlfriend who is Vietnamese and boyfriends who are German. Towards the end of the novel she becomes pregnant and finds herself in the same situation as her mother with an absent father and the possibility of a white child. Again there is no problem with the man.
This was my main take from this story - it seemed strange with all the other themes that feminism was absent.
The narration was in the first person and in the form of a conversation. I interpreted that the second person or questioner in bold capitals changes in the different sections - from a confrontational USA border guard asking about her visit, to a therapist and then her own internal monologue.
I was intrigued by the title of the book and the references to a snack machine - comparing the dispensing coils with life situations?
I found the mixed race point of view a new facet to racism literature and the style got my synapses firing!