“Kreisläufe” in the taz

So glad to see Elisabeth Wagner’s perceptive review of my book in the taz!

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. 

Returning to the Villa Romana

When I got off the train yesterday at Santa Maria Novella, I was convinced that I remembered the way; I knew that I needed to take the 36 or 37 bus, but the stop I recalled turned out to be the Capolinea, the end of the line where I disembarked two years ago, over an hour early for my train departing Florence—upon which, to kill time, I wandered around the neighborhood of San Marco, lugging my suitcase behind me in the early-morning serenity of the still-deserted streets. I remember wondering if this mysterious new epidemic would remain confined to its various pockets of outbreak, when all at once, as I turned the corner onto Via Nazionale, the brightly lit letters of Hotel Corona stopped me in my tracks.

As with my arrival in Florence two years ago, it took me some time to find the bus stop, just enough for a vague sense of anxiety to set in. I was traveling by choice, I had an invitation and a room to stay in, and yet the news images of people fleeing first the advance of Russian troops on the Donbas and then everywhere else superimposed themselves onto the bustling Florentine streets: people abandoning their cars and possessions after running out of gas in thirty-mile-long traffic jams headed west for the border checkpoints; men pulled out of queues by Ukrainian soldiers and forced to bid goodbye to their families and join the armed resistance. Children with bunny ears on their woolen caps alarmed and wailing, their faces turned away or pressed to the foggy windows of buses and trains, their mothers unable to console them. Women carrying toddlers in snowsuits and diaper bags and lugging suitcases behind them, bracing for hours on foot in the freezing cold to reach a border or train station even as students and other people from non-white countries are turned back from the checkpoints and often beaten. People hauling cats and dogs on their backs, their children in tow, most of them too exhausted or too numbly focused on surviving the next minutes and hours to cry. The sight of their shock and their uprootedness slices into the marrow and fuels my own temporary lack of orientation, my struggle to conserve the last six percent battery power on my cell phone. I backtrack several times, perspiring and unable to properly concentrate, knowing all the while that I am headed to warmth and safety, to privilege. It eventually occurs to me that I can check Google Maps, and I finally find the bus stop, ashamed at my lack of resourcefulness, at my porosity and empathy that help no one.

— read an excerpt from a new book-in-progress on Three Quarks Daily.

Never forget that you can leave again—

Andrea Scrima’s autobiographical novel follows an American artist living in Germany back to the US and her family origins

Review of Like Lips, Like Skins for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
By Maria Frisé (excerpt, April 8, 2022)

“I’d never survive in the US,” Andrea Scrima once said in an interview. At the time, the reference 
was to Trump’s America—but one could also apply it to her family background, which she’s portrayed in two unequivocally autobiographical novels (A Lesser Day, and now Like Lips, Like Skins). A scholarship to the art academy enabled the author to move to Germany; she lives in Berlin and has since taken on German citizenship. Yet again and again, the past catches up with her, and feelings of guilt surface. Should she have stayed to protect her younger brother from the violence-prone mother, who tyrannized her four children and silent husband? This is one of the stories Scrima tells in Like Lips, Like Skins. 

The novel’s protagonist Felice is, like Andrea Scrima, an artist, and an exhibition sends her back to her native New York. Her hopes that things might have improved in her absence prove to be in vain. “Never forget that you can leave again”—this is what her partner tries to impress upon her as she’s departing Berlin. But before long, she falls prey to the past and the mother’s sudden fits of rage. When she visits the old house on Staten Island or the Burger King she worked in at the age of fifteen in a first step toward gaining independence from her family, she becomes immersed in painful memories from childhood. 

Andrea Scrima is a powerful storyteller with a confident command of the German language.
In collaboration with Christian von der Goltz, she translates her English-language manuscripts into German, as she’s now done masterfully for Like Lips, Like Skins (German edition: Kreisläufe, Literaturverlag Droschl, 2021). 

Hotlist for Kreisläufe

So happy to see the book continuing to bring in reviews — this one from the “Hotlist,” a list of important new titles from independent presses.

“Wie werden wir zu dem, wer wir sind? Ist es möglich, unserer stofflichen Beschaffenheit zum Trotz, mit der wir in die Welt gesetzt wurden, der eigenen Herkunft zu entkommen? Diese Fragen verhandelt der tief tragische Roman Kreisläufe der amerikanischen Schriftstellerin und Künstlerin Andrea Scrima. Dies ist ihr zweiter fulminanter Roman nach Wie viele Tage (2018), der im Literaturverlag Droschl auf Deutsch von ihr vorliegt.”

“How do we become who we are? Is it possible, in spite of the physical givens we were born with, to escape our origins? The deeply tragic novel Kreisläufe (Eng: Like Lips, Like Skins) by the American artist and author Andrea Scrima explores these questions. This is her second brilliant novel after Wie viele Tage (Eng.: A Lesser Day, 2018) to be published in German by Literaturverlag Droschl.”

Read the Hotlist’s review of Kreisläufe here.