Like Lips, Like Skins: A Review of Andrea Scrima’s New Novel

Gallus Frei-Tomic in literaturblatt.ch, January 22, 2022 (Excerpts translated from the German)

Four years ago, Andrea Scrima’s literary debut A Lesser Day was already an epiphany. Now, with her second novel, Like Lips, Like Skins, Scrima deserves a far wider audience. 

All readers know that certain books are capable of generating a very special resonance. Sometimes it’s the themes that appeal or repel or in any case fascinate. And sometimes it’s the language, the sound of the words, the images that rise up from the page. With Like Lips, Like Skins, Andrea Scrima achieves everything a novel can do, at least for me. Her call to “imagine this” was so intense and worked its way through me to such an extent that, once I finished the book, I sat there somewhat stunned and began leafing back to revisit all the scenes I’d underlined and slip back under that warm blanket. 

At one point in the story, after Felice has already begun enjoying some success as an artist, she flies back to New York to put up an exhibition in a gallery. Years have passed; encouraged by her friend Micha, she decides to confront the trauma of her agonizing relationship to a mother who tormented the family with her unpredictability, her explosions of rage, her way of interpreting the world according to her own whims. Felice has barely arrived, and already she’s struggling—and in this struggle she senses that she’s not only at risk of losing her family ties, but also her own self. 

Like Lips, Like Skins is crafted as an act of retrospection. The first half of the book is dedicated to the mother, the second to a largely silent father who recorded what seemed important to him in calendar journals Felice saves from certain destruction and pores through after his death. What so moved me about the book is not the story of a woman’s emancipation, or the family drama, or the poison that eats its way through relationships, but the way in which Andrea Scrima approaches her subject matter—the way she conjures words and pictures at the same time. Here is an author who writes in polyphony, who layers her images and then peels the layers away to reveal the cracks in the paint. The author is uninterested in revelation or exposure. Like Lips, Like Skins is a series of images that show us how to see. 

The Power of Appeal—Andrea Scrima and the Art of Understanding Things

Review of Andrea Scrima’s new novel Like Lips, Like Skins by Elisabeth Wagner

Published April 19, 2022 in the taz

(excerpts translated from the German)

An “I” has to save itself, has to get away from home. Via London, the English Channel, and the East German transit route to West Berlin and a winter that smells like coal dust and bites the lungs. A single furious first paragraph is enough for the escape, a single breath. One could almost say the text inhales. It does this to remember: out of love, out of fear, for reasons that go deep and don’t lend themselves to being easily summarized, whose urgency, however, is beyond question in the prose of the New York-born writer and artist Andrea Scrima. 

(…) The world and the narrator’s own life present her with scenes of varying degrees of danger. As moments of decision, of escalation, of quiet observation that is anything but harmless. The “I” draws a brush across a canvas and watches the excess paint collapse to either side; tracks in snow melt, freeze over, wear away. Dreams are a part of reality, a parallel world that leads to new discovery. The text retains its inner logic with virtuosic ease. How lightly and yet how powerfully this “I” holds the narrative reins in her hand. 

(…) In every family, says the first-person narrator, there is a geometry at work, a concatenation of secrets and taboos. Scrima, who translated Like Lips, Like Skins together with Christian von der Goltz, incorporated both fictional and autobiographical material into the novel. Like the “I” of the book, she was born in New York, lives in Berlin, and has a son. The author lends the narrator several of her artworks, as well as much in the characters of the parents. Yet Scrima rejects the label of autofiction. The term causes people to underestimate the importance of the form, she explains in a mail, and one would like to respond that it’s hard to imagine not admiring the formal sophistication of this book. The delicate transitions between grammatical forms of past and present, for instance, which slip by unnoticed as one moves through time and space. Indeed, there’s great precision in the way recurrent patterns demarcate the various layers of experience. So precisely that one could read this novel as a poetic research text that tells the story of the end of a depression and takes on the spell of repetition in its own injured and, yes, passionate way. So much happens in this wise and beautiful book, and it’s all described without the slightest hint at an exclamation mark. The power of its appeal is all the stronger for it. 

here is an excerpt from the original German text, which takes off from the concept of autofiction:

Decoding a Language, Part Two: An interview with Andrea Scrima about her new novel “Like Lips, Like Skins”

I’d like to draw your attention to the second part of an interview Ally Klein did with me that’s just gone up at Three Quarks Daily. We talk about my new novel, Like Lips, Like Skins, the German edition of which (Kreisläufe, meaning circuits, circulations, circles) was published a few months ago by Literaturverlag Droschl, this time with a focus on the presence and function of art in the book:

After years of writing (and finally publishing), I finally felt secure enough to go a step further in my second novel. I began describing the artmaking process, and eventually imported some of my actual art into the work in order to see what form it might take there. I was also interested in seeing how much of the original artwork can’t, in the end, be captured in words. What remains of art in its description? When you narrate it, but can’t actually see anything? Are you merely describing the intentions behind the work, are you describing an idea or the work’s appearance? Are you creating something completely new?
To my surprise, I discovered that it was suddenly much more about the fictional character I ascribed a particular work to, in this case Felice—it shifted the focus to her psychology. How did she arrive at this type of art, what does it have to do with her life? What does her art say about her as a character? A completely new narrative coalesced around the description, one that’s pretty far removed from the original impulses that led to the actual work the writing is based on.
I’m driven by the idea of ​​bringing contemporary art a little closer to readers not normally all that familiar with it. This is a work of literature, after all, and not aesthetic theory. And so the concepts are somewhat simplified, and even if some of the passages are still pretty abstract, I hope the human connection comes across easily enough. Because the art in this book is only one component in a larger work that addresses many other themes: family, trauma, parents, children, getting older.

When, in Like Lips, Like Skins, I lend this work [the installation Through the Bullethole] to the protagonist, she automatically becomes associated with the mental state the work suggests—this slightly crazy, obsessive gaze through a bullet hole, this necessarily limited view of the world—it all becomes far more psychological in the book, and Felice is equated with her work much, I might add, in the way that I’m often equated with my protagonist. There’s this (I hope) hilarious scene in which the work is hanging on the walls of a gallery and Felice tries to explain the photographs to her mother, sister, and the mother’s neighbor, who they’ve brought along for some reason. All of a sudden there’s this 1:1 thing happening, it’s assumed that she’s the subject of the work in a way that never actually happened to me with the original installation—at the time I made the work, the question of authorship was never confused with the idea of a journal or diary, with a confessional gesture. It was understood to be a formal conceit. The work’s inner logic was clear, and the installation cohered in a larger way that allowed the ideas feeding it to breathe, to grow into a sort of organism. When I imported a description of this work into my book, I had to learn what it could do and what it couldn’t do. It certainly wasn’t about selling the reader on conceptual art. I simply wondered what would be left of a work as complex as this after reducing it to words—and what I could make it say about my characters.

x

The first chapter of the German edition Kreisläufe appeared in issue 232 of the Austrian literary magazine manuskripte; English-language excerpts have appeared in Trafika Europe, Statorec, and Zyzzyva. The German version of Part One of this interview appeared in issue 234 of manuskripte, the English version here on Three Quarks Daily. For Part Two, Ally Klein corresponded with the author over the course of several weeks via email; the above is an edited version of a talk the two gave in Berlin on December 11, 2021 at Lettrétage.

For English-language rights to Like Lips, Like Skins, please contact Soumeya Roberts of HG Literary, New York.