“[. . .] Im Moment arbeitet die Künstlerin und Schriftstellerin anzwei Werken, wovon im Laufe ihrer Stadtschreiberinnen-Zeit hier mindestens eines zu Ende gebracht werden soll. Die darin behandelten Themen reichen bis ins 15. Jahrhundert ihrer eigenen Familiengeschichte zurück und sind im Risorgimento Süditaliens zu finden. In jenem Buch – für dessen Idee Scrima das Stipendium des Grazer Kulturamts erhielt – wird es neben der Internetrecherche nach den Spuren der Vorfahren auch um die mit den politischen Folgen der Risorgimento verbundenen Ursachen der großen Immigrationswellen von Süditalien in die USA gehen. Parallel dazu wird aus den vielen Geschichten und Schicksalen, von denen sie in diesem Rahmen zu erzählen weiß, eine Essaysammlung entstehen. Unter dem Titel “Displaced” wird sie sich so dem großen Thema der Entwurzelung annehmen und eine Art Zusatzmaterial zum Buch veröffentlichen.”
“[. . .] At the moment, the writer and artist is working on two books simultaneously, one of which she hopes to complete in the course of her time in Graz as the city’s writer-in-residence. Her theme originates in the Risorgimento and her family’s history, which dates back to the 15th century; the focus here is on the remaining traces of her ancestors in documents online and elsewhere, as well as the huge waves of Southern Italian immigrants to the US in the aftermath of Italian Unification. Parallel to this book, Scrima is working on an essay collection comprising a wide range of interrelated stories. Titled Displaced, the collection’s overriding theme is uprootedness; it will be published as a companion volume to the book on Southern Italian immigration.”
In April 2023, at the end of a three-month residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, I and four other residents put on a collaborative performance of music and words at the Taos Center for the Arts. In the background: composer of contemporary music Shiuan Chang.
One week earlier, I read from my novel Like Lips, Like Skins at another event, this one at the Blumenschein Home and Museum—you can see a video of this reading here.
From Gesa Stedman’s beautiful Berlin keynote to Donna Stonecipher, Lucy Jones, Ben Ferguson, Crista Siglin, Ann Cotten and many more, the entire Parataxe Symposium at the Literarisches Colloquium is now online in digital form.
I read from my novel Like Lips, Like Skins (German edition: Kreisläufe) in German and English, and before that had a talk with our brilliant moderator Shane Anderson about Berlin, about going from being a visual artist to becoming a writer, about the difficulties of translation, about what Berlin was like in the ’80s and what it’s like for young people facing the housing market in Berlin today.
From 39:10.
Check out the Stadtsprachenwebsite for videos of all the panels.
Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus, Berlin branch of Germany’s largest bookstore
(Excerpts translated from the German)
By Gibran
Andrea Scrima is so many things (…) basically, you could say that she’s primarily a visual artist, and that art informs her widely acclaimed novel Like Lips, Like Skins. (…) And yet it’s up to us—and our booksellers’ honor—to keep books like these on the market. This podcast supports this effort.
(…) We witness the protagonist Felice as she goes about unraveling her family’s story, a feat she performs largely through her art—that’s the genius of this book. Like Lips, Like Skins is mainly based on perception; when it takes a small coffee stain as its point of departure, it spreads out into wider reflections on how memory works, and how we often only remember the memory of a memory, or the story of a memory we’ve told ourselves. Scrima shows us—and this is one of the book’s key motifs—that our memory is incomplete, and that we have to keep telling ourselves things, that we have to tell stories to ourselves over and over again.
Like Lips, Like Skins is also a remarkably complex narrative of a mother-daughter relationship as well as a retrospective search for a father who sacrificed his dream of becoming an artist for his family. (…) It’s a generous book that succeeds in converting art into words, into language. Scrima achieves this in different ways: through meticulously precise descriptions of particular perceptions, and through weaving actual artworks into her narrative. At some point, the artist protagonist has a five-thousand-square-foot space in a warehouse building at her disposal, discovers a tiny hole in one of the windows there, and realizes that she can see things at a distance of hundreds of yards through it. When she changes her perspective, the image visible through the camera’s lens shifts as well, jumping hundreds of yards in either direction. Felice takes a seat behind the camera and waits. Now and again, something happens; when a truck appears or a bird flies past, she realizes that she’s unable to press the shutter release. She then takes this observation and uses it as a path that carries her back to her family’s story, and the way she does this is breathtaking. Scrima’s approach to turning perception into words is unique, and it requires a good deal of courage. But the reader has to reckon with the fact that they won’t be told the whole story, because the book’s form is fragmentary—which makes perfect sense, because in the final analysis it’s the way you think on a day-to-day basis that you apply to your own personal biography, and this thinking is also, to a large extent, fragmentary.
(…) Like Lips, Like Skins should be required reading for all art fanatics, because it offers a glimpse into the arduous path through the art establishment. I recommend this book to readers interested in visual art and perception—but even more to anyone concerned with the problems of biographical writing. I’ve seldom read a novel in which the different phases of an individual life were interwoven in such a palpable, believable way. A must!
“I absolutely want to recommend this book: Kreisläufe (Like Lips, Like Skins) by Andrea Scrima. I admire this book (and its author in any case), and it feels as though I should offer my humble thanks to Andrea Scrima, who drills into all manner of trauma, entanglements, the repetitive patterns I’m unable to drill through, not by a long shot. It’s an undeviating book in pursuit of pain and its urgent themes. Andrea Scrima describes growing up in an American family, and at the same time a young man’s early years in a GDR juvenile detention facility and the life of an artist with all its doubts and struggles of self-discovery. I don’t much feel like summarizing the contents, I only want to share how important I find this book, and—I repeat—admire it because it works its way through themes that are only seemingly personal, at first glance—because these are structural matters. This book is a call for a carefulness and closeness that know the traps of every allegedly bad memory.”
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.
“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).
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.”
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.
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 Germantext, which takes off from the concept of autofiction:
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.
I’d like to draw your attention to 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: the strange-seeming discrepancy in titles, which gets to the heart of what the novel is about, the book’s approach to visual imagery and artmaking, and some of its main themes.
One of these themes is trauma:
The moment a traumatic experience occurs, certain regions of the brain, for instance the frontal lobes, are effectively switched off, while other, older parts of the brain—the regions responsible for the organism’s survival—take over. It’s similar with flashbacks: because our understanding of time lies in the neocortex, we experience a threat from the past as immediate, as though it were happening in the here and now. Cognitive thinking as well as language and memory formation also freeze up; in other words, all of a sudden there’s this huge blind spot ballooning outwards. The senses of a person experiencing a flashback become flooded, they fail to understand that they’re not in danger, they can barely find an explanation for their affective state and physical reactions and afterwards, confused and disoriented, they remember very little.
Another theme is autofiction:
Writing in the first-person singular means that you can’t analyze a character on a meta-level or from a distance, you have to make them do things, dream, talk, think. This establishes a closer link to the reader. I gave Felice certain elements from my life, I gave her Staten Island and Berlin and some of my art—to an extent, I even lent her my own late parents. This can be misleading, of course, and it can mean that people confuse the character with the author. However, if you start reading the book in an “autofictional” manner, you’d have to become skeptical at the very latest with the character of Micha. I’ve been living in Berlin for 37 years and wanted to write about my adopted home. It was clear to me that my view of Germany would be perceived as that of an outsider, a foreigner, even if I’ve spent my entire adult life here. And so I designed a fictional character to speak in my stead; over time it became increasingly clear to me that this person had to come from the East. Micha was a vehicle for me to lend a face to some of my own observations on a divided Germany and German Reunification. I live between these two cultures, I have both an inside and an outside view of the two countries. As a former inmate in a GDR juvenile detention facility who never really gained a foothold in the West, Micha is also caught between cultures. He’s stuck in this dilemma, but as a German he has the authority to articulate his thoughts about this country. And so suddenly, the figure of Felice could become his counterpart and take on the role of the somewhat clueless American. This is where an attentive reader would have to notice that the first-person narrator can’t be autofictional—because Micha and his observations are of course the author’s thoughts, statements, and hypotheses. In other words: Micha, c’est moi.
The first chapter of Kreisläufe was published in issue 232 of the Austrian literary magazine manuskripte; English-language excerpts have appeared in Trafika Europe, StatORec, and Zyzzyva. The interview has also just appeared in German in issue 234 of manuskripte.
Most of you know I’m not Serbian, but I’m honored to be included in this issue of contemporary European literature titled “Serbian Moments.” It’s nice to see the first chapter of the original English edition of my second book, “Like Lips, Like Skins,” published in this fine magazine of European writing. Thanks, Trafika Europe, and thanks, Andrew Singer, for championing so much important new writing in translation.
Coming soon from Literaturverlag Droschl: The German edition of Like Lips, Like Skins.
I’ve been co-translating it, we’re happy with the results, but the essentially untranslatable title has transformed into a word that means cycles, circuits, circulations, in other words contains multiple meanings that fit this novel about family trauma well.
Warily, circuitously, I peer back in time; I slip on my coat feeling raw and vulnerable. Sudden insights spark strobe-like in the dark, momentarily illuminating long-ago scenes in chiseled, lightning-etched detail. I shiver and tremble as unanticipated stabs of anxious rumination slice through the everyday like shrapnel. Discovery, when it comes, can be strangely unspectacular. Climbing the subway steps one drizzly morning, emerging onto Oranienburger Strasse as the copper-colored reflection of a streetlamp not yet turned off from the night before flashes in the scattered drops dotting the asphalt before me, I suddenly see it: each generation blindly, unknowingly conscripted in a mission to correct the failures and heartaches of the one preceding it, to undo the damage of time.
Zaghaft und über Umwege blicke ich in die Vergangenheit. Ich ziehe mir den Mantel über, fühle mich roh und verletzlich. Plötzliche Erkenntnisse leuchten wie ein Scheinwerfer in die Tiefe und erhellen für einen Augenblick längst vergangene Szenen in feinen, blitzartig gestochenen Details. Mich fröstelt, ich bekomme Gänsehaut, wenn Momente ängstlichen Grübelns wie scharfe Pfeile den Alltag durchbohren. Entdeckungen können, wenn sie eintreffen, verblüffend unspektakulär sein. Als ich eines regnerischen Morgens die Treppen der U-Bahnstation Oranienburger Straße hinaufsteige und auf dem von Regentropfen gesprenkelten Asphalt vor mir den kupferfarbenen Widerschein der Straßenlaternen sehe, die von der letzten Nacht noch nicht erlöscht sind, erkenne ich plötzlich, wie jede Generation blindlings und unbewusst einem Auftrag unterworfen ist, die Fehler und Schmerzen der Generation vor ihr zu korrigieren, um die Schäden der Zeit wiedergutzumachen.
andrea scrima 