Album review
Julia Kornberg’s debut novel, Berlin Atomized, straddles the past and the future. In the early 2000s, the three Goldstein children lived in Nordelta, Buenos Aires, in an affluent suburb, where they wished to be anywhere else. In the near and distant future, they travel to try and find themselves in Jerusalem, Berlin, Uruguay, Paris, and Tokyo to varying success; Mateo dies fighting in the IDF, Jeremías envelops himself in the punk scene, and Nina settles down with a German artist whose steely visage proves alluring. But the cities are alive — terrorist attacks from a grassroots New Resistance threaten to upend the fabric of reality just as the siblings are figuring out their interiority.
Dizzying, funny, and irreverent, Berlin Atomized runs parallel to the twenty-something question of “What now?” with some terrifying answers. For my first in-person Author Spotlight interview, I talked with Julia Kornberg and Jack Rockwell, the book’s co-translator, about terrorism, art, self-translation, Judaism, masculinity, and much more.
SAM FRANZINI: Congratulations on your debut novel and welcome to DC! How did the event in New York go?
JULIA KORNBERG: Really well, I thought.
JACK ROCKWELL: It was awesome.
KORNBERG: Christian Lorentzen, the guy who did it with us, is a genius. He handled the question-and-answer dynamic really well.
FRANZINI: Was it a reading and Q&A?
KORNBERG: We skipped the reading. We intentionally did that, because I feel like every event I go to has twenty minutes that are additional. We try to keep it short. I also have a shitty voice in English.
FRANZINI: Berlin Atomized has already been published in Mexico and Argentina — how has the US reaction been?
KORNBERG: It’s been nice. There’s a lot of excitement, and some very kind words. It’s very fresh, so there haven’t been a lot of reviews out yet.
FRANZINI: I’m interested in the Jewish culture in Latin America — you’ve written about Clarice Lispector and Marcelo Cohen before, and I’m wondering if they influenced you as an Argentinian writer.
KORNBERG: Cohen not so much, because I hadn’t read him back then, but Lispector definitely. In general, she’s one of my favorite writers; I feel like The Hour of the Star had a big impact on me. Also her first book, Near to the Wild Heart. By now I’ve read almost everything she’s ever written, but back then, those were the two I had in mind.
FRANZINI: I don’t think I’ve read a book that was also translated by its author yet, and I really wanted to talk to you about this process. In The Drift, you write that translation “enlarges a work’s renown, but sometimes even dictates the content of the work itself.” Was this true for your own novel?
KORNBERG: Well, what did you think, Jack?
ROCKWELL: I wouldn’t say the book changed a lot in translation. Or rather, I don’t think the process of translation was as responsible for many of those changes as Julia returning to something she’d written in the first half of her twenties in the second half of her twenties. From the outside perspective, it seemed you were revisiting your work with a slightly more mature writer. With some limited cases, where we’d make small, low-level decisions to change things based on the rhetorical demands of English. But my read was that it was basically an opportunity for her to edit the book again. And we worked with a really fantastic editor [Deborah Ghim] at Astra House.
KORNBERG: Our editor was great. And the circulation in Argentina and Mexico was very limited, they only printed, like, 300 copies in both cases. To her, that meant we could debut this novel as if it was for the first time, and I really enjoyed that. Having studied translation from an academic and contemporary literature point of view, I was very aware of what can happen when you have those biases to make it into an ‘English market,’ and I wanted to consciously avoid that. So we took it as a creative opportunity.
FRANZINI: Yeah, later in that essay you say that a reader is looking for ‘authenticity,’ so the Latin American writer might fit into stereotypes to convey their work to an English-speaking audience. Was this something you had to resist?
KORNBERG: For sure. I feel like the Goldsteins, particularly, are not the model Argentine citizens, they’re this rare, weird, minority of the very upper echelons. That was a way, from the conception of the book, to avoid something that was ‘authentically Argentinian,’ since there’s no such thing.
FRANZINI: As a translator, Jack, how was it like to work together on the manuscript?
ROCKWELL: It happened in different ways at different times, but generally, one of us will produce a first draft of one section, send it to the other, then there’s notes and a little back and forth. Especially at the beginning, we met in person to talk about it. I don’t think tensions ever got high, but there were occasional tensions.
KORNBERG: Well, there’s two things to that. One is that we usually drank while translating. And we’re not married to our ideas and we’re willing to [negotiate].
ROCKWELL: It was a very healthy and energetic and collaborative environment. We’ve been doing this for long enough now that we’re already working on the co-translation of her next novel, and I think we’re starting to understand each other very well, and we can be frank with each other about what’s best for the book. As someone who translates a lot of other people and isn’t able to talk to them, it actually opens up the playing field as far as translation decisions.
FRANZINI: Yeah, I didn’t picture arguments, just small tiffs about a collaboration with two creative people.
KORNBERG: That happened a little bit, but I mean, we can plant the seed and say we had long arguments and broke up our friendship for months. [Laughs] I wish, because that would be a good story. But I remember one really long argument about how to translate a measure of marijuana. In the book, Jeremías, when he’s young, smokes a veinticinco, which is now a passé term for, I think, 25 pesos of weed. But that was in the late 90s, early 2000s. When I was young, un veinticinco was 25 grams. And then we had this whole thing, ‘Americans don’t use grams, how many grams should he consume, he should be really stoned, but not so stoned, etc.’ That took us weeks. I went and did a bunch of research, I talked to some old friends of mine.
FRANZINI: How did you get into translating, Jack?
ROCKWELL: I had kind of a life changing experience in high school where I took an AP Spanish Literature class, and I don’t know what happened, I was just incredibly receptive in a way I hadn’t really felt in English classes. I went to college and wanted to take literature classes in Spanish every semester, which led me to the comparative literature discipline, where I started to do translation. Something about it, I really liked it.
FRANZINI: Let’s get into the book — the three Goldstein siblings pass their time growing up in Buenos Aires with constant bathing, music, or reckoning with themselves. “What a massacre it is, growing up,” Jeremías writes. What did you pull from to create these early scenes?
KORNBERG: All of the chapters were pretty insular. Initially, I had conceived it as a collection of short stories, and each chapter had its set of influences. I think the first one, with Nina, I was thinking a lot about Sylvia Plath, who comes back towards the end. But also Sofia Coppola movies. I tried to infect myself with that girly but also miserable and masochistic teenage vibe.
And then for Jeremías, I tried to listen to as much rock and roll and punk music as I could. I also felt the Jeremías storyline felt closer to me because I was a really awkward kid in high school, and the way I had to become a sociable person was get really into music and prove myself. I was that girl that when they asked, ‘What’s the third track on this Pink Floyd album?’ I was ready to answer. I tried to create a similar thing with Jeremías, where he’s from Nordelta, he’s a total outsider, but music is the one thing that helps him communicate to his fellow youths. And of course, the Cromañón [nightclub] massacre, which didn’t happen to my generation but really affected it. I was trying to channel my older friends, which are the same ones I asked how to translate a veinticinco.
FRANZINI: It could totally be short stories as well. I thought all of the viewpoints and locations kept the book so electric. Why did you want to have a somewhat fractured account?
KORNBERG: It was interesting narrating a family history where all three Goldstein siblings have very different trajectories in life, both in their relationship to Judaism as well as their political and historical developments. I also get tired very easily, and I feel like readers get tired very easily, so I tried to make it dynamic. I also felt like if I stuck with a character for too long, you’d get tired — you can’t read too much Nina Goldstein, because these characters take themselves too seriously. I love all the characters, but there’s only so much attention readers have. And in Latin American literature, [a fractured feel] is quite common. It felt natural.
FRANZINI: Tell me a little more about this rule between Nina and her friends, that “a boy born during the dictatorship is a broken man.”
KORNBERG: That was something my friends and I came up with; it’s another Sofia Coppola thing, we dated much older men, but you had to set a limit. Eventually, I realized all of the men I was dating when I was a teenager were still post-1983. I thought that was a safe rule, someone who’s born during the democracy.
FRANZINI: I thought the passage about Nina and Angélica playing Discovery by Daft Punk and making up stories, no matter how convoluted, was a good way of finding yourself in art when you can’t really in the real world.
KORNBERG: I don’t get asked enough about Angélica, who’s maybe one of my favorite characters. I don’t know what you think, Jack, if she’s the hero of the story, since she’s the one who re-reads and reconstructs the Goldstein story from the future. I like the idea of them having this very tender and genuine relationship, like when you’re kids. And then I think it develops into something that’s always a little erotic, like a lot of female friendships are, but never consummated. They never fuck, in other words. And I think that’s important, also, to hold the friendship to a highly idealized position. That was why I wanted them to be creating something and have this childish moment.
FRANZINI: Angélica bookends it too, which I thought was interesting.
ROCKWELL: I think the bookend is a very potent gesture for Angélica to be returning to these different moments in time. It’s easy to forget when you’re reading, that everything you’re getting is filtered through her, that she’s the compiler of all the materials. It’s also the story of this person’s nostalgia for who her friends used to be and who she used to be through them.
FRANZINI: The middle sibling, Mateo, joins the IDF as he finds a version of masculinity he can access at war that isn’t available in his hometown. I’m interested in why you chose this path for him.
KORNBERG: Mateo’s story was the first one that I wrote, actually. I wrote Berlin in a very short period where I was traveling for two months. It began in Israel, where I had never been, and I met a man on New Year’s Eve — two Americans came up to me and my friend and started chatting us up in Jerusalem, and I was not interested, but this guy told me his story. He was this guy from Atlanta who had what he saw as a very boring life, playing video games all day. One day, he was like, ‘I’m gonna join the IDF.’ In his view, that redeemed his life, it gave his life a meaning, it gave his life a purpose, he was fighting for a nation, for the Jewish people. I thought that was really interesting. When my vacation was over, I sat down in a café in Tel Aviv and wrote that. Then I had to work backwards, thinking, ‘How was Mateo’s childhood like, that led him to do this?’’
ROCKWELL: It’s interesting because it’s a different and much darker version of what Jere is doing in his life with his music. You reach a certain age, and you start to feel really lost in the world, and you have to pick something. It can be as simple as a personality or new friends, or something much more serious, like connecting to history in a much more attainable and darker way.
FRANZINI: That’s so true. I feel like I know two or three people, through friends, who join the IDF because they’re bored. It’s just the thing to do.
KORNBERG: To me, that’s a big mystery. If someone said they were joining the IDF, everyone would ask why. Argentina is so tranquil, it’s so relaxed! There’s no terrorism attacks, there’s no wars. Now I think younger people in Argentina are not only moving to Israel, but joining the IDF much more. I don’t know if there’s a crisis of meaning. Maybe people are really lost. If you’re a pandemic baby, you might have lost the most valuable years of your life where you should be developing a personality. I don’t know. Or they believe there’s true meaning in fighting for a country. Men will literally join the IDF before going to therapy.
FRANZINI: There’s a masculinity crisis, for sure. While he’s in Gaza, Nina views him through Instagram along with “every sniper’s eye with a low-fi filter.” Interestingly, this “softens the memory of him” for Nina. Why do you think so?
KORNBERG: I think what softens Mateo in the end is the fact that he died, and she retraces his steps, and finds out he was in love, and had friends. I feel like in Nordelta, my impression of him was that he was a loner, and had all these girlfriends, but that was it. Whereas in Israel, life is given new meaning, and that happens for people. I felt like that happened to me to a certain extent, not that I was a loner, but my life changed dramatically when I moved to New York and my social life became much more interesting. Maybe that’s what he finds in Israel.
FRANZINI: I thought the Israel passage had an interesting way of using humor to make sense of things, if that’s a correct read.
KORNBERG: For sure. One of my favorite novels I read this year was Operation Shylock, which I think is the funniest novel ever written about Israel. It’s written by Philip Roth, and it’s about Philip Roth, the author, who finds out there’s someone LARPing as Philip Roth in Israel, trying to convince Ashkenazi Jews to move back to Europe. It develops into this crazy picaresque. He gets into trouble, he has a lover who’s in ‘Anti-Semites Anonymous.’ I read that in February. Back then, I was super tormented about everything that was happening in Israel, and all the reactions, and how radioactive it was in America. I was really shattered. And Operation Shylock carried me through it.
FRANZINI: It’s interesting Nina is transgressive in that she’s against the PC culture that most young people subscribe to. She enjoys that Ossip’s wife owned airline stock, and is turned on when he almost says something anti-Semetic. When did you think about when making her character?
KORNBERG: I’m not entirely sure. She becomes more PC by the end, when she moves to Europe, that’s a big influence on her. I liked the idea that she’s a rebellious, irreverent character. At the time in Argentina, everything was very PC, and age-gap relationships were looked down upon. I just wanted someone who had a freer relationship to her own desire. And it can be hot, today, an old anti-Semetic guy. That’s also where the Plath influence is coming from, being able to express the contradictions and desires. It was important to create a character that felt a little truer.
FRANZINI: Later, Nina gets a job at what she says is a “screenplay factory,” a minimally creative dead end. But for artists she meets, she notes that one’s own branding is a part of their art, that “they themselves were the product they were trying to sell.” Do you feel similarly as a novelist?
KORNBERG: Oh, yeah. I think that’s what’s expected, from anyone, a writer or artist. You’re like a brand manager. I think that’s very boring and it takes a lot of time and energy from writing. If you’re so concerned with creating your brand, you end up not creating a lot of art. And I wanted Nina to be aware of that. It’s the same thing with translation, we could brand a book about being an authentic representation of Argentinian Jewish literature and culture, but that’s not my interest.
ROCKWELL: The first event we did around this book, actually, the talk was titled ‘Become Unmarketable.’ I think about it now, these days, because it seems like the book is not unmarketable, actually, because people are interested in it, which is amazing.
KORNBERG: It’s the same with advertising, for movies and TV shows. You can take an approach, which is that you see whatever’s working in the market right now and you imitate that in the hopes that you’ll be the next Sally Rooney. I haven’t read her, actually, but I respect her as an Irish person.
You can replicate whatever works, or you can try to create a new desire. For example, I like Mariana Enríquez, and in Argentina, she decided to create a new thing. She did it for a long time, and well enough that people started to consume it. That’s more desirable for me, or when it becomes authentic, when I’m doing what I want as opposed to doing what would sell.
FRANZINI: Do you feel like you had to do that at all? Try to make it, or yourself, sellable?
ROCKWELL: I don’t want to speak to your process, but one thing I felt when I read this novel for the first time is that it’s so profoundly not a branding gesture.
KORNBERG: It’s slightly autistic.
ROCKWELL: Yeah! It’s a little messy, too, and I think that adds to it. I don’t want to say the word ‘authenticity,’ because that itself is a brand touchpoint. But to me, at least, it doesn’t feel contrived. Which makes it legitimate and important.
FRANZINI: It’s interesting the siblings are relatively well-off, but it doesn’t usually come through in the text. Was that a conscious decision?
KORNBERG: Yeah, I think when you’re very wealthy, you don’t realize it, until you see an actual poor person. I’m not from Nordelta, but I’ve been there, and I think it’s that. It’s a utopia created so you can avoid seeing a poor person who’s not your maid, gardener, or the plumber. And even the maids and gardeners and plumbers cannot walk on the streets, they have to take these little vans. It’s awful. Have you been? We should go together.
ROCKWELL: We will. Sounds good. Yeah, I think the way you handled that gesture of creating geographic isolation for themselves is really interesting. For me, part of why it feels you can be uncertain is because the siblings are working really hard, at times, to not seem like rich kids. Finding ways to pass for cultural capital, which happens like crazy, in New York, in particular.
KORNBERG: No! There are rich kids in New York who pretend not to be? [Laughs]
FRANZINI: You do a lot of speculative thinking as the book moves towards the future — in 2027, Paris is decimated by a new terrorist group. You write that it’s “vigilante justice coming directly from the Parisian underbelly… that targeted the symbols of Capital and Power, all the elite institutions propping up the status quo.” Tell me a little more about this group and their inspiration.
KORNBERG: If you read the Spanish version, it’s a little different; it became much clearer in English. I think it was inspired by a need to narrate a revolution in the contemporary tense, [because the present] feels so neoliberal and flat and boring. Even though [people] pretend to be very outraged on Twitter, there seems to be very little actual political action. I wanted to have something explosive — maybe because I have the need to make things happen. On the other hand, I thought that if there was going to be a contemporary revolution, especially now, when the rhetoric is so plain and uncomplicated — you know, being a leftist used to mean you would read and write and discuss, until, like six in the morning. I think that’s no longer true. I also wanted to narrate a failed revolution. I’m not sure how I personally feel about the [book’s] New Resistance, but it was important to narrate A) something happening, something big, explosive, and revolutionary and B) have it be more complicated than something like a utopia. Because that’s also harder to narrate.
FRANZINI: So was the Spanish version more toned-down, you would say?
ROCKWELL: Maybe just more incoherent. [Laughs] And not in a derogatory way! It was just something I really loved, reading Atomizado Berlin for the first time, was this Paris chapter. It was so hard to figure out what was going on. And to some extent, I think that’s still well-preserved in this new edition. And that’s a feature, probably, of what it’s like to live in wartime or chaos, when political orders or information channels break down. I find didactic speculative novels that have a strong prescription for what’s gonna happen to be uninteresting, and that’s part of what keeps Berlin Atomized interesting, the blurriness of what exactly is happening, geopolitically, makes it feel more credible and exciting.
FRANZINI: I’m intrigued by some of the characters’ acceptance of the violence, saying that the world is constantly filled with attacks on our minds and bodies. Marlene describes an encounter with a creepy cop, and she says, “on account of that guy alone, you and I should have burned down a cathedral.” Do you think there’s some truth to that?
KORNBERG: Like, a personal, political truth, not necessarily, but I do think that’s something that’s in the air. When Notre Dame burned down, I was saddened by it, I don’t love it when things get destroyed. But I do recognize there is some kind of libidinal impulse, when something like that happens. Like, the killing of [Brian Thompson, UnitedHealth Group] CEO. It’s obviously wrong, when they kill a guy, but he was a bad guy and that was kind of funny. And the world’s not gonna change because one billionaire died. And for me, the question is open, I don’t have a solution for that. I see a lot of violent rhetoric from the left today, and I identify as a leftist and come from a leftist tradition, but I don’t necessarily think that’s good. A lot is meme-ified. But I recognize it’s funny, and there’s instant approval from me. That was the tension, in this chapter, there’s this political unconscious happening in the world right now, but how far can it go? How good is it? I don’t have an answer.
FRANZINI: I agree with you in that the world is starting to feel more dangerous and sporadic lately — did you always want the book to go into the future and explore?
KORNBERG: Yeah, I wanted it to start as a coming-of-age and end in the future. I was very naive, I didn’t know what I was doing. Those were two of the main genres I consumed: coming-of-age, and science fiction, because I was a hopeless nerd.
ROCKWELL: You said something the other day, too, which had something to do with imagining people of our generation turning 30. Something like that, where speculative fiction became required to tell that story since it hasn’t happened yet, in some ways. Having to do with their contact with history. The reason people connect to this book is because, simultaneously, [our generation] is reaching the age where the real world sinks into you and it’s hard to be a kid anymore…
KORNBERG: We’re pushing 30, Sam.
ROCKWELL: But also, reality happens a little bit. For all the jokes you want to make about the end of history, the political status quo that people were calling the end of history is definitely ending. I don’t agree terminologically with calling historical change ‘history,’ I thought that was a stupid idea ever that it had ended, but I’ll take that up with Hegel. [Laughs] The rate has only accelerated in the few years since you’ve started the book.
KORNBERG: It’s also natural for a twenty-something to ask themself, ‘Is there a future? What does it look like?’
FRANZINI: I’m there now.
KORNBERG: Me too!
FRANZINI: Well, the book makes a lot of parallels with real-world eco-terrorism or demonstrative acts. Did you ever have to limit yourself with how extreme it got?
KORNBERG: No, I tried to take it as far as I can, and see where it takes me. Those are the two models, right, Angélica has a cyber activism position. That was influenced by Edward Snowden, Aaron Swartz, the idea of using the internet and widespread military technology for good. And then there’s physical violence, to the extent of what that can or cannot be politically effective. To me, I was also thinking about the Latin American guerillas. Growing up, and even now, there’s this debate as to whether it was good or not. The people that were mass murdered during the military dictatorship in Argentina, people say they deserved to die. Militantes, we called them, activists from the left wing that would kidnap people, like [Argentine dictator Pedro Eugenio] Aramburu, the Born siblings, who were the biggest millionaires in Argentina. That’s the mark of real wealth in Argentina, if you’re kidnapped during the dictatorship, it means you’re rich as fuck. [Laughs] That was the other question I had in my mind, to what extent can political violence be useful.
FRANZINI: I think the book had so many ideas of how art will be distributed in the future. There’s the screenplay factory, Rizwan Hassan, an anonymous yet prophetic rapper, and after the UN dissolves, you write that many writers kill themselves. Do you think the novel had a little bit of satire?
KORNBERG: I think it does. I like to read satire, and I think it’s quite hard to not satirize the literary and the art world, especially, where everyone’s so cool they can’t talk. That’s real money, and real branding. [Satire] is natural for an Argentinian.
ROCKWELL: I thought the book was hilarious. I’m a bad typifer, I don’t know if it’s qualified to be a satire or not, but it is satirizing things left and right. And it’s very characteristic of your style; you have these awesome one-two punches a lot, where it ends on these snappy terms, lampooning someone or some shot of grief or horror. The fact that you cycle through so many of them makes it work and doesn’t make it feel stale.
FRANZINI: I was talking to someone else about this, who said Jews by nature are a little more cynical, which I can definitely feel when I’m writing.
KORNBERG: Yeah, I like cynicism.
ROCKWELL: Can you name a good writer who isn’t cynical or funny?
KORNBERG: No!
ROCKWELL: And cynical is one way of putting it, but one of the basic gestures of literary fiction is that it tries to break down the illusions people have of themselves, which is literally everyone’s main survival mechanism, believing they’re a worthwhile person. If you can’t have fun and make jokes about that while you’re doing it, you’re totally fucked. For me, it’s more ironic than cynical, that’s the default gesture for dealing with this stuff.
KORNBERG: Writing is a little cringe. You have to pour your soul into characters, landscapes, situations, blah blah blah. If you don’t level yourself down with a little cynicism or irony, I feel like it can get corny.
ROCKWELL: Writing is tremendously cringe, which is why most writing is really bad.
FRANZINI: I also read that you’re finishing your second novel, Las Fiestas. How is that going?
KORNBERG: I wrote it four times. For the first time in 2020, high out of my mind during the pandemic in Argentina. Then I came back and rewrote it, more sober, again in 2022, and then finally I did one last rewrite this year. And now it’s done, I hope. We’re both translating it. If you like the Paris chapter, it’s very much like that. It’s about a guerilla group in downtown New York and a woman who infiltrates this group and falls in love with one of the members.
FRANZINI: In the same style as Berlin, do you think?
KORNBERG: I feel like it’s more formally experimental, right? I tried to work with the prose a lot more, develop more of a style.
ROCKWELL: And there’s a rotating structure; there’s a chapter in the present, recent past, then a semi-redacted CIA-style document. Which I think is super fun. And another thing Julia didn’t mention is that the guerilla group is a bunch of linguistic students, and she’s mocking university culture, and they’re also supposed to be spies for the US. And their grand terrorist plot is to convert New York into a Spanish-speaking country.
FRANZINI: Terrorist nerds. I’m obsessed.
ROCKWELL: It’s fucking awesome.
KORNBERG: It’s bizarre, but I really enjoyed writing it.
Berlin Atomized is out now.
