THE ARTIFICIAL SILK GIRL

A particularly vivid, gritty new English translation of a 1932 novel set in Berlin between the world wars, whose expatriate author (1905–82) enjoyed early critical and popular success, incurred the displeasure of Nazi censors, spent two years as the mistress of the great Austrian writer (also an expatriate) Joseph Roth, and wrote, pseudonymously, in obscurity (having returned to Germany) until her death. Keun’s once-famous novel is the defiant (and anything but confessional) “confession” of its narrator Doris, an ambitious would-be actress whose drift into petty theft, poverty, and disillusionment is observed by a sharp unsentimental eye that also provides numerous vignette-like glimpses of the seaminess and heartlessness of a vibrant city stifled by the imperatives of Nazism. As we learn from scholar Maria Tatar’s helpful introduction, this was conceived as an “answer” to Anita Loos’s popular potboiler Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It’s more than that: a commendably deft work of social criticism and understated character portrayal. A most worthy rediscovery.