Alina Bronsky. Scherbenpark

World Literature Today, May-June, 2009 by Elizabeth Powers

Alina Bronsky. Scherbenpark. Cologne, Germany. Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 2008. 287 pages. 16.95 [euro]. ISBN 978-3-462 04030-2

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Scherbenpark, a first novel, begins with a contradiction: "Manchmal denke ich, ich bin die Einzige in unserem Viertel, die noch vernunftige Traume hat. Ich habe zwei, und fur keinen brauche ich mich zu schamen. Ich will Vadim toten. Und ich will ein Buch uber meine Mutter schreiben" (I sometimes think I am the only person in our quarter who still has sensible dreams. I have two, and don't need to be ashamed of either one. I want to kill Vadim. And I want to write a book about my mother). How sensible is that? Well, they are the words of Sascha Naimann, the seventeen-year-old first-person narrator, clearly still suffering, like her younger half-sister and half-brother, from the trauma of witnessing the murder of their mother by her husband, Vadim.

The setting is mostly a public housing ghetto near Frankfurt, known as "Solitar," inhabited by Russian immigrants, and "Scherbenpark" (broken glass park) is the place where the young among them hang out and get drunk or stoned. Not a very inviting milieu. The plot, such as it exists, derives from Sascha's relationship with an editor whose newspaper has published a sympathetic account of a penitent, imprisoned Vadim and who lives in a really neat house in Bad Soden am Taunus. Sascha's time is also taken up with inventing scenarios for disposing of Vadim, but in the end he escapes her revenge by hanging himself in jail. In between, she wrecks the relationship between her put-upon cousin (imported from Siberia to care for Sascha's siblings) and another Russian shipwreck. She goes inline skatbig. She has sex with two men she barely knows. She exchanges taunts with the low-life Russian youth. Did I forget to mention that she is first in her class at an exclusive Catholic school (accepted because of her "immigration" background, "um ein bisschen Integration zu proben"), even though, in the course of the novel, she spends no discernible time reading or studying? It is an edgy coming-of-age story, and one's taste for it will depend on one's tolerance for the breathless tirade of opinions by an obnoxious, know-it-all adolescent.

Scherbenpark represents what has become an exception in contemporary publishing: the young, unknown author (born in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg in 1978, she came to Germany at the age of thirteen) sends e-mail queries to two editors, describing the book, and receives requests from both to review the manuscript. The rest is history. Despite being marketed by its publisher as an "adult" novel and so received (mostly positively) by adult reviewers in the German press, the readers' comments at Amazon. de (also mostly positive) indicate that the real audience for this novel is what the industry calls "young adult."

At the end, Sascha rises above the Scherbenpark milieu of vicious young thugs, perverted old men, and other assorted nondreamers. She gathers her cell phone, a baggie of marijuana, and her MP3 player, puts on her black baseball cap, and heads out into the world on her own, without goodbyes: "Es ware tibertrieben zu sagen, dass ich jetz gute Laune habe. Aber irgendetwas singt in mir, und zwar einen anderen Text als Eminem" (It would be an exaggeration to say that I am in a good mood now. But something is singing inside me, indeed something besides Eminem). Stay tuned for the next installment.

Elizabeth Powers

New York