“A Transparent Woman”
by Hari Kunzru
from the July 6 & 13, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
While I have read anything by Hari Kunru, I certainly have seen his name come up a lot over the past several years. Some of his books have been up for awards I follow (2017’s White Tears, for example, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize), he has judged awards I follow (for example the 2018 Man Booker International Prize), and he writes often for magazines I follow (see his article in the July 2, 2020 issue of The New York Review of Books). “A Transparent Woman” is the first time he’s published fiction in The New Yorker. It is adapted from a chapter of his forthcoming novel Red Pill, though it looks like one that should stand alone as well.
From his interview with Deborah Treisman (I haven’t read the story yet), “A Transparent Woman” is about “a young woman unwillingly recruited as a Stasi informer in East Berlin in the early eighties.”
Sounds intriguing!
We have two weeks to read this story, so I hope you find the time and will share some of your thoughts here! I hope everyone has a good week!
This story captures the atmosphere of menace that pervaded certain neighborhoods of East Berlin pre-reunification. The details seem very well researched, the insidious ways that German socialism undermined the future of the young. It is a very sad story about how a young woman’s life was ruined. The socialists in control or who were in control punish and suppress any and all representions of materialist capitalism no matter how benign, by fermenting disorder among innocents. There is the polarization of socialist values versus capitalist values. West Berlin is rich, East Berlin is poor. Under the socialists no prosperity can be allowed. In order to avoid getting too political which using the term “transparent” suggests, the dangers of two separate opposing viewpoints challenging one another is diligently probed. When either suspects the republic will not survive unless the other is taken down, that indicates “Trouble” with a capital “T” in River City. I think it is good that Hari Kunzru writes so well how socialist tendencies can so easily seep into a nation divided or polarized by two extremely opposed view points. There is no comfort to be drawn from the vision set down in this short story or perhaps from the novel it is part of. In the interview with Hari Kunzru, in the novel from which this short story is taken, there is, I think, a narrator outside the story who finds out all about what is going on while working on a piece concerning the German Romantic novelists which, while it is brutally ironic, will probably give the reader a slight bit of distance from which to perceive the socialist horror rather than be beaten down by being stuck so squarely in the middle of it.
“Beaten down” — perfect phrase, Larry, for how I felt reading this. “oppressive” was the adjective I thought of. Yes, the author does describe well the Communist system and Stasi tactics. But, I was thinking as I read it, to what end? There is no plot. This is not a story, but reportage with a fictional central character. She is a puppet or victim. When I read that it is an excerpt from an upcoming novel, I understood. Perhaps it will not be so dull in the novel, but that makes no difference to the leaden recitation in this “short story”. The NYer cheats us once again.
William,
Thanks for the compliment. Oppressive though, is a precise description of the feeling one gets from reading this story. I guess it’s point is to warn against the evils of socialism that some people sense in our current administration and which others in our current administration sense in the viewpoints of the far left. It made me think of all the buyer habit info that certain web providers have on us that purportedly helps us locate products and services we want to buy. But on the other hand, helps them make money off our personal identities.
I guess it depends on if one wants to read short stories to get away from harsh realities or to confront them within fictional realms. To much realism can blunt the magic of a good story with a plot and some kind of change at the end. The New Yorker originally wasn’t given over to publishing short stories much concerning political or societal dilemmas but turned more in that direction in the 60s and more heavily in the last few years. But there is the dullness of real life that can seep into these kinds of stories that some readers would rather escape.
Well, to my reading the story was gripping (not “dull”) and has tension and a plot that resolves effectively at the end. The protagonist seems for much of the story to be in a Kafkaesque world, and then, at the end, she isn’t: there’s a reason for the things that have happened to her. One can imagine her finally, slowly regrouping, because there is sense instead of random world enmity to her suffering. She is not guilty, as she had come to feel.
I would agree about this being reportage, which I’d felt about other New Yorker stories recently and about another punk-rock tale from The Atlantic called “Deep Cut” although that was more memoir but very thinly veiled. But I’ll agree with Robert–this was thoroughly engrossing and a page turner. Does it tell us anything new? Probably not but it’s a good reminder nevertheless.
I listened to the author read his story while my eyes followed the text. For me the story had grit and was compelling. There is a sado-masochistic edge to the piece. In places the story jumped. It was strange. To learn this is part of a novel and has been adapted into story form explains this. I will look into more work by Kunzru. I like his voice, and could probably get work as the voice for audio books, other than his own. Oddy, this exerpt does not make me curious to read the entire novel. It is as though the theme and subject were handily enough done in short form that I am satisfied to not go further.