Berlin Cantata

April 30, 2012
Thirteen narrators comprise the choir of Lewis's newest (after Meritocracy: A Love Story), a story of a city and its inhabitants seeking atonement for the past. A chain of events is set into motion when Holly, a Jewish American woman, travels to Berlin soon after the fall of the Wall to reclaim the house from which her parents were expelled during the Holocaust. In the decades since her parents lost the property, both Nazis and Communists owned the house, and Holly finds it currently occupied by the remaining members of the "old East German Writers Union." The quest to repossess the home, and thus gain closure for the horrors inflicted on her parents, is far more complex than she expected. Whilst in Berlin (which one narrator describes as "a hothouse, that had grown under the Cold War's searchlights exotic flowers of every inappropriate variety"), she meets a fraudulent war hero and a local journalist, both of whom, in their respective narratives, reveal or withhold secrets that inform the relationships between them. Linked by a history of shifting loyalties and deceit, the narrator's stories are filled with the agony of loss and the desperate search for identity. By giving voice to his characters, Lewis navigates their tales with compassion and fully explores the complications of living in a city haunted by its violent past.