Here in Berlin

Starred review from August 21, 2017
A nameless Visitor, lonely and insecure, spends several months in Berlin during 2013, absorbing the stories of dozens of people whose lives have been shaped, or twisted out of shape, by the Second World War and its aftermath. With the vividness—and unreliability—of a fevered hallucination, they tell haunting, and occasionally intersecting, stories that last only a few pages but linger much longer. An elderly Cuban, visiting the city for a funeral, recalls being kidnapped as an adolescent by the sailors on a German submarine, and then returned months later to his astonished family. A woman often mistaken for Eva Braun first embraces the similarity and then disguises it. A centenarian recalls visiting the United States in 1935 to research “the oratorical styles of black preachers in the South” for the benefit of Hitler. Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban) evokes a multicultural Berlin, shaped by those who arrived in East Berlin from Cuba, Angola, and Russia. The novel’s many excellent characters and their stories combine to create a sense of a city where, as an amnesiac photojournalist puts it, the ghosts “aren’t confined to cemeteries.”

This audiobook is structured as a set of stories collected by the unnamed narrator, most of them as told to her in the first person. They're reminiscences of life in Berlin from just before the German surrender in 1945 to the near-present. Narrator Joan Walker doesn't attempt to give each of the many characters a particular voice. Instead, she gives each of them a personality and a mood ranging from seductive intimacy to cold fury. Each of the speakers comes to life in a different way. Many of the characters also have ties to Cuba, the narrator's native land. The oppressions of Castro, Hitler, Stalin, and of family eventually come together into an emotional saga held together by Walker's masterful interpretation. D.M.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine