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A Novel
by Aria Aber
Book Reviewed by:An electric debut novel about the daughter of Afghan refugees and her year of nightclubs, bad romance, and self-discovery—a portrait of the artist as a young woman set in a Berlin that can't escape its history.
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can't get out.
In Berlin's artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.
Then in the haze of Berlin's legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe's controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila's family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?
A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.
One
The train back to Berlin took seven hours, and the towel in my suitcase was still wet from my last swim in the lake, dampening the pages of my favorite books. I took the S-Bahn and then the U-Bahn home to Lipschitzallee and walked past the discount supermarket, the old pharmacy, and the Qurbani Bakery with the orange shop cat lounging outside its door. In our building's elevator, an intimate odor assaulted my nostrils: urine mixed with ash. Hello, spider, I said, looking at the cobweb in the corner. The ceiling lamp twitched, turning alien the swastika graffiti. My key, fastened by a pink ribbon, turned in the old lock. Nobody was home. I kicked off my shoes. The cat meowed for food, its dander floating in the air. My room was merely all it had been for so many years: a suffocating box with a tiny window, pink sheets, and that Goethe quote I'd painted in golden letters above my desk. The popcorn ceiling seemed lower than before. I wiped the kitchen counters, walked into my parents' ...
Nila's past-tense narration comes from an ostensibly older and wiser place, but she's clearly kept her penchant for pretension. At one point she tells the reader how she is "troubled by the fundamental uncertainty inherent in post-structuralist theories"; the reader, in turn, may be troubled by the complete earnestness with which she says this. The novel is far more interesting and Aber's writing skills far more affecting when trained on Nila's reckoning with her identity. Never having visited the country of her parents' birth, she senses a chasm between herself and them; but although born and raised in Germany, she knows too that she'll always be taken for an auslander—a foreigner from someplace or other. Growing up in a post-9/11 world, with daily life punctuated by spasms of neo-Nazi violence against immigrants with "a southern look," Nila consciously snips off her Afghan roots in public. Sometimes she tells her friends she's Italian; other times, Colombian or Greek. The wounds of this internal exile cut deep, and Aber traces their emotional scars with heart-breaking intensity...continued
Full Review
(598 words)
(Reviewed by Alex Russell).
Jamil Jan Kochai, author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, finalist for the National Book Award
At once euphoric and despairing, philosophical and poetic, Good Girl is a heartbreaking song of youth and desire and violence and history and the unbearable solitude of displacement. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Usually writing this good is realized through a gauzy patina of recollection, but in Good Girl the bass beat is still full in your chest, the coke drip's still a numbing bitter in your throat. Aber's ear is so remarkably good you hardly even notice she's building this great symphony of textures, mosaics within mosaics. Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster
In Good Girl, pleasure is textured, surprising, and treated with utter seriousness.
In Aria Aber's Good Girl, narrator Nila spends her teenage years in the labyrinths of Berlin's legendary techno clubs. Awash with drugs and unrestrained by straight-laced sexual mores, the Berlin club scene was hand-built by grassroots pioneers into a recognized cultural institution, eventually attracting visitors from across the globe desperate to sample its anything-goes spirit.
West Germany first began developing a taste for electronic music in the 1980s, influenced by the emerging techno artists of Detroit. But it was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that the capital city's club scene truly exploded. With huge numbers of East Berliners migrating westward, large swathes of former communist neighborhoods were ...
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