I cannot resist the temptation of reading/listening a book everyone is talking about, especially if it has so many everyday life millenial references and is also partially set in Berlin.
I usually give time to the book everyone is talking about - literally almost everyone it happen to know in my literary realm - but the times we are living are not usual so I cannot escape the hype. Correction: I refuse to escape the hype.
Reading those days is, at least for me, such a desperate addictive compulsion: I want to read something and I just doing it, no matter the price and the time. I put (almost) everything on hold and keep reading. 2-3 books at a time, no matter, important is to got my safe ticket to the brains world, when my everyday life is happy and blessed and I am grateful for...(you know, the usual Zen stuff everyone should repeat to her/himself once in a while) but still, is missing some normal interactions and intellectual excitement that I cannot always got through my Zooms and calls with friends and relatives and all the online chats that are filling my days. I don´t like ordering clothes online, shops are closed, and I am not so sophisticated to start decorating and redecorating and redesigning my home. Therefore, I am left with the option of buying, purchasing, acquiring books from my very long TBR saved books on Goodreads.
Would you expect from me more empathy and emotional outbursts during those times? Me too, but it happens to belong to a generation that is coping hard to deal with their emotional brains. (This being said from someone coming from a family that also had a serious problem with expressing their human emotions and empathy, so genetically there is a serious background which pledge against my humanisation). In line with a sentence from Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler proclaiming: ´Your bf just died. Get a manicure´.
I had access to this book as audiobook, read by Rebecca Lowman. I´ve heard during an exchange on Twitter with another book blogger that the printed version may have a particular page setting, but although I hurried to check it out at the huge book temple of Dussmann Kulturhaus in Berlin, there were no print edition so I cannot comment upon this aesthetic format of the book.
Instead, I have a lot to say - or pretending to - about the book itself. While scrolling through her bf´s phone, the storyteller - just another unnamed character, not happy with that anyway and not always in sync with a generation whose blessed successful able-to-write-a-coherent-sentence-therefore-writers members are usually keen for recognition and individuality - a blogger writing about everything, discover that he - ´I was almost sure he is Jewish´ - is actually managing an account promoting conspiracy theories. It´s the day Trump got sworn in ´when people look sad´ (at least in NYC). Is this actually cheating what he did? Before finding the answer and after a couple of more online searching - aka stalking, but this is how we operate those days - the infamous bf dies in a bike accident before giving her the chance to properly dump him and the storyteller moves to Berlin where they actually met.
As she ´needed a project, not a bf´ - OMG how perfectly does it sound as the description of someone I used to know, only to replace bf with gf...- she set up various fake accounts on dating sites and she is meeting guys after guys, to whom she tells every time a different story. Is this actually lying? Escape from the risk of being identified online - not that it seems to be anything relevant about her coming out - or just faking? She goes on by altering - lying? - her details in her visa application for the Auslandebehörde - the Foreigners´ Office in Berlin. Until something happens which has to do about faking too (I am not about to disclose anything about the ending, because I was told and read that book bloggers should definitely NOT spoil the ending of a book).
There are many personal references to the author herself in the story: her lown commuting between US and Berlin, a reference to her picture on Twitter. There are many familiar - to me - references about the lazy aimless life of Berlin literary illuminaries, with book critic groups and people so keen to hear your story while meeting randomly in a coffee place only to forget everything the next minute youb bid ´good bye´. Plus, the bonus of relationship anarchy and poly- thing because really, who need relationships nowadays? It´s so selfish and kitsch emotional to be in love only with someone, when you can avoid love and, for instance, enjoy life? You can, and you can too, I just cannot and please accept my apologies...
The story is filled with questions, so many life and relationship questions, unfolding in a very disparate, chaotic way, which copies the pace of life itself. The life we are living when we have to Google someone before a date, or we give ourself fake names for our online activities and we got doxxed once in a while. We are fast to answer but not everything can be reduced to a couple of Twitter characters anyway, and that Instagram account may not obviously explain or reveal yourself. All those fake Rumi quotes and the random quotes about life and success and gratitude can be an act of faking too.
Don´t get me wrong. I really love my Millenial life and I resonate a lot with the character from Fake Accounts. Not all the life fragments and sequences are coming together well in the book and this is not always on purpose, but there are so many questions to ask and answer. In the end, our American in Berlin starts learning German, because there is no other efficient way to get distracted from big life questions.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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