Rich in the whimsical observations on the ones who choose the life of solitude, Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis is a deeply reflective and thoughtful novel with subtle elements of magical realism and a dreamlike atmosphere exploring themes of isolation, loneliness, solitude, the invisibility of people, their emotional displacement from the past, the impact of history on one’s life, the relationship between the city and the self conveying the complexities of the inner life. The novel also captures the essence of Berlin and its abandoned spaces layered with history and life of a young immigrant woman searching for a sense of belonging. It offers the portrayal of post-Wall Berlin and the intricacies associated with the identity.
Set in post – reunification Berlin of 2000s Book of Clouds tells a story of Tatiana, a young Jewish-Mexican woman in her late 20s. We meet her around 2007 at the time when she had been living in Berlin for the past five years and currently working as a transcriber for the reclusive elderly Jewish historian Dr Friedrich Weiss.
As readers, we follow Tatiana as she spends her listless days in Berlin, being a solivagant, often doing solitary walks around the city and occasionally meeting lonely and invisible to others Berliners.
“Cities were so much about sound (…), and on some days I simply had no desire to cross paths with anyone, not even strangers on the street, so like the disfigured person who only leaves his house after dusk I would wait until it grew dark to go out and then keep to the quieter streets, and as I walked I would look up every few meters, in search of that illusion of the moon travelling across the heavens while the clouds try in vain to keep up.”
Back in Mexico City Tatiana once found a novella in translation by the Jewish-Austrian writer Stefan Zweig left by a customer at the deli run by her parents. After reading Zweig she decided to study German. As a result of winning a one-year scholarship, she returned to Berlin in 2002 to study German. It was her second visit to the city following the initial stay with her parents back in 1986, three years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In her five years in Berlin Tatiana frequenly changes her address: Charlottenburg, Kreuzberg, Mitte and when we meet her she lives in Prenzlauer Berg:
“After five years I still had the impulse every ten to twelve months to find a new home. Spaces become too familiar, too elastic, too accommodating…. With each move something was being renewed.”
During her time in Berlin she struggles to make ends meet. Over the period of five years Tatiana does a variety of odd low-paid jobs such as an au-pair, a Spanish tutor, an employee at a printing centre, health food shop, a receptionist and assistant editor at the journal and finally as a part time transcriber for Dr Weiss.
“Ever since arriving in Berlin, I’d become a professional in lost time. It was impossible to account for all the hours. (…) Days would draw to a close, and I would ask myself what had been accomplished, how to distinguish today from yesterday and the day before. (…) I had no problem spending Monday and Friday alone. Saturdays were neutral but each Sunday had to be reckoned with. There is solitude and then there’s loneliness. Monday through Saturday were marked by solitude but on Sundays that solitude hardened into something else. I did not necessarily want to spend my Sundays with someone but on those days, I was simply reminded (….) that I was alone.”
Tatiana’s life in Berlin is solitary and by her own words her existence in the city is vulnerable to small setbacks. She enjoys silence, has an aversion to artificial light and hates the sensation of people approaching her unannounced. Tatiana rarely sees her own neighbours, only hearing their movements.The encounter with them would be rather uncomfortable for Tatiana. On one occasion following the carful calculation of distance between the entrance and the place where she was standing she decided to slow down in order not to be forced into a greeting with her neighbour. She had a few attempts at friendship but in exile she found herself needing other people less and less. She was eager to connect to people with rich inner landscape.
Tatiana dreaded Sundays and yet insisted on spending time alone and pondered on how with each Sunday sunrise the question of how she was going to fill the hours arose.
“I found it as hard as ever to account for all the hours in Berlin which passed like minutes or even seconds, unable to hold onto time.”
At some point Tatiana only sees Dr Weiss more or less regularly even though their interactions were limited. As for Dr Weiss he was like Tatiana someone who lived his life in solitude. While Tatiana’s solitude was more stagnant, Dr Weiss’s solitude was industrious. He was in his 70s with fourteen books published prior to 1989 but no publications afterwards. He authored books on Berlin as the Wounded City, the interwar period beteeen 1918 and 1939, writers such as Walter Benjamin and Joseph Roth as well as his observations on life on the both sides of the Iron Curtain between 1961 and 1989. Through one of the conversations between Tatiana and Dr Weiss we learn that he had once the opportunity to visit Tatiana’s hometown, Mexico City as a result of his friendship with Chiki Weiss, a husband of a surrealist British Leonora Carrington living in Mexico. He also had photos displayed with the philosopher Isaiah Berlin but his phone never rang and no one seemed to be visiting him when Tatiana worked there. Dr Weiss does not seem to have any social life or any close family members. We also learn that Dr Weiss has lived in Berlin his entire life with exceptions “of a few unfortunate years” which we can assume had something to do with the fate of the Jewish people during WW2. Dr Weiss saw the city changing many times. His connection with Tatiana was through the past: they both saw Berlin in 1986.
Initially Dr Weiss and Tatiana had a silent relationship which suited them both. They did not look for widening the scope of their interactions. When conversing with Tatiana, Dr Weiss often looked past her rather into her eyes.
“Niceties were ignored and the etquiette (…)was left at the door. (…). Occassionally he would murmur Good morning or even How are you? But he did not await a response.”
Much was left unspoken between Dr Weiss and Tatiana until she left Berlin. Based on their relationship silence or gaps in conversation did not always mean that there is nothing to talk about but rather that there is too much to express, just there are no words to convey it.
Tatiana wanted to know what Dr Weiss was doing when he was not speaking into his dictaphone and how he spent his days when she was not around but that part of his life remained unknown to her.
“There was so much I still wanted to know about Doktor Weiss and so much I felt he didn’t yet know about me, so many things about myself I wanted to set straight and so many doubts I still had regarding his life.”
Through her work as a transcriber Tatiana meets another Berliner, Jonas, a 36 year old meteorologist living in Marzhan whose childhood fascination with the ever-changing sky offered him an escape from the bleak realities of East Germany. Meteorology helped him understand and cope with recent history before and after 1989. There were many similarities between the behaviour of clouds and the history of Berlin.
In response to her interactions with Jonas, Tatiana observes: “How does it feel to belong to a country [East Germany] that only existed technically, for forty years, eleven months, and three days? “
Jonas was interested in the clouds because of the message they offer: “all structures are collapsible. (…) Their own existence condemned to rootlessness and fragmentation. Each cloud faces death through loss of form, drifting towards its death, some faster than others, destined to self-destruct before it reaches the other end of the horizon.”
Clouds could be understood as pawns in the communist system with free will but still at the mercy of other structures around them.
Their interactions, along with Tatiana’s encounters with Berlin’s abandoned spaces and her reflections on solitude offer a narrative that is both profoundly introspective and poetic.
Throughout the novel Tatiana reflects on her connection to Berlin as an immigrant whose existence depends on having the paperwork all in order. Her own identity and understanding of her place in the world have evolved over the last five years in Berlin:
“On some days I felt attached to the city and, on others like some kind of botched transplant with a few renegade veins. (…) Berlin, omphalos of evil, the place where World War II had ended (…). “
Tatiana learns more about Berlin, its history and how the city organism has impacted the lives of Berliners. When transcribing one of Dr Weiss’s tapes, Tatiana came across his reflections on how some streets in the districts of Mitte and Charlottenburg have changed becoming “grey cements angles devoid of meaning”.
Buildings in Berlin such as Wasserturn which in 2000s became a complex with apartments and galleries with a ‘nice view’ but in 1933 it was used by SA troops for holding and torturing anti-Facist prisoners. Dr Weiss thought that Wasserturn space should not be used for anything new and be respected as the place of the historical memory. He also pointed out to another example of the villa where The Wannsee Conference was held in 1942 during which the Final Solution was decided. Thirty six years later the same villa was turned into a hostel for inner city children.
Tatiana portrays the clash between the older generations who think about spaces as they were and the current generation who thinks about regeneration of the landscapes and historical sites. Berlin is depicted as the city with a whole physical as well as psychological topography that lay deep underground.
When the Berlin Wall was set up on 13 Aug 1961 by the Soviets, public transport also was cut in two: Western trains had to cross through the Soviet sectors in the East. Many West Berliners became desensitised over time and stopped looking out while crossing through the eastern sector. Netherworld was created, frozen in time for nearly thirty years. Each ghost station was a compendium of abandonment. Each had its own somber mood, walled up exits and entrances, fluorescent bulbs and muted lights embodying a world of silence and stillness. After the fall of the Wall city planners found out that these ghost stations were time capsules locked back in 1961. Through her job as a transcriber Tatiana interviewed a driver who had driven trains through East and West Berlin prior to 1989.
Eventually Berlin turned its back on Tatiana.
She gave five years of her life to this city and towards the end she felt a huge wave of relief as well as a pang of nostalgia knowing that all this would belong to the past, to “the Berlin years”.
“Once you decide to leave you view a city through an entirely different lens. The simplest of actions, actions you have repeated one hundred, maybe a thousand, tomes, swell in significance since each time may now be the last: the last time you buy bread at the bakers, the last time you ride on the U-Bahn Line 2, the last time you go to the newsagents for a travel pass or a pack of gum. (…) There were so many things I would miss, I realised, even things I hadn’t seen in a while, like the stone-faced museum guards from the days when I still went to museums (…).”
Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis has become one of my favourite books I have read this year. Her writing is deeply contemplative and soul-soothing. Reading Book of Clouds was a wonderful experience and I highly recommend this book to everyone.