A Book Report in Four Shapes
Oval: Berlin Dystopia 3

How do you approach reading and thinking about a book that is, mysteriously, called Oval? I stared at the cover of Elvia Wilk’s Berlin novel, flipping it over as if I could crack open some prophecy from the purple egg shape illustration. Taking up the US author’s challenge, I followed form(s): looking for lines, triangles, rectangles, and ovals to reveal some of the book’s themes, from housing to sustainability to inequality. The symbology proved a suitable reading framework for the book’s ominous urban rumblings as well as familiar images of transient expat life in a 21st century “creative” city. Get the book from your library and retrace this four-part geometrically patterned book report or try your own “graphic” approach on your reading list. 

By Jutta Brendemuhl

Rectangles: Housing

“Even though the speaker was floating three feet above the floor as advertised, its Bluetooth connection had never worked, so they had to connect content-filled devices to it with a long black USB cable, which undermined the aesthetic effect... ‘Just another reason the past is prologue,’ said Laura, fumbling with the cord until a sound stuttered through.”

The house that Elvia Wilk’s Berlin protagonists inhabit is a not-so-smart box in “an assortment of experimental architecture clustered a thousand meters up the side of the Berg.”

The house appears as anthropomorphic, self-generating, and even gendered. The protagonist couple, Anja and Louis, think of it as female, and its increasing malfunctions—sweating, indigestion, a tangible sense of irritable discomfort—seem to insinuate something like metabolic or hormonal change, or perhaps the wrath of a primordial nature goddess.

Inside and outside are dissonant in Oval, the housing situation is no exception: The house creates its own microclimate that sends Anja back up the Berg to get a jacket when she steps out. There’s always “a few house things” that weigh on the Berg’s inhabitants. As with other interventions in the Anthropocene, the development is a failure with a vengeance. Everyone knows it, but no one has the energy or impetus to do much about it, outside of developing apps and drugs.

Before, Anja and Louis lived in a more traditional Berlin structure: the Schrebergarten, the small allotment gardens that often host a rough cabin and vegetable patches. Wilk delves deep into the urban history and meaning of the Schrebergarten, letting a bit of light or perhaps just retrospective utopia or nostalgia in. She describes the “urban farms, amounting to an ur-sustainable-living movement...[When] the war ended and the embargoes were lifted and the bombed-out city was temporarily left to its own devices, displaced people set up camp in the gardens. Sheds became homes. Temporary visitation became habitation...[after WWII]; city was once again an enormous expanse of empty real estate;…and the forebears of Anja and Louis started to show up. One by one each tiny garden and all its historical baggage became a sliver of private vacation property...By the time Anja arrived in the city, when rents everywhere inside the S-Ring were at an all-time high, the central Schrebergarten had all been renovated…, their miniature charm canonized into tiny overpriced rentals for urban getaway ‘experiences.’”

Next and finally, we get to the oval and a look at urban inequality.