The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin

Art critic Bell (The Artist’s House) mesmerizes with this intimate, curious memoir of Berlin, where she’s lived for two decades since arriving as a student in 2001. Soon after Bell and her family found a new home in 2014 on the Landwehr Canal, the once glorious, now decaying 19th-century apartment (and its frequent leaks) became a symbol of her own crumbling marriage: “Well-kept secrets rose up.... Damp bruises of distrust and neglect became suddenly visible. Welled resentments burst their banks.” Perpetually fascinated by the city’s architecture, she fixated on learning more about the mechanics and history of the building, consulting a feng shui master, city archives, and “literature from a century ago that took place in the streets around.” She also questions how the landscape shaped the culture and history of the city as she employs it as metaphor for her marital and other life struggles: “Berlin’s sandy floor, this soft and porous medium, exerts a constant, subtle downward pull. Does this explain the strange lethargy that sometimes hangs across the city?” Berlin’s literary heritage, from Walter Benjamin to Christopher Isherwood, gets documented alongside its tumultuous history. In enumerating the atrocities of WWII, perspective is gained: “How can I lay my life’s petty derailments and coincidental geographies alongside a violation of this scale?” It’s a transfixing cultural topography that will appeal to readers of Rebecca Solnit. Agent: Nina Sillem, Nina Sillem Agency. (Sept.)