EXBERLINER Issue 163, September 2017

WHAT’S ON — International Literature Festival
Arjun Appadurai, Banking on
Words Globalisation theorist
Appadurai builds an elaborate
argument on the failure of language
to disentangle the ciphers
of modern finance, unpacking
terms like “asset-based securities”
and “credit default swaps”.
In order to reclaim agency, he
invokes McKim Marriott’s and
Deleuze’s notion of the “dividual”
as the necessary counterpoint
to the Western construct of “individuals”.
Yes, it’s complicated,
and Appadurai’s work demands
perseverance —but it’s rewarded.
Amanda Lee Koe,
Ministry of Moral Panic
The role of hierarchy and exploitation
in defining today’s Singapore
soon becomes apparent in
these wonderfully quirky tales of
servants and masters, rejected
wives and aging pop stars. With
a clear-eyed and affectionate
appraisal of human needs, Koe’s
startling use of idiom and situation
comedy (“She loved holding
on to his penis and scrubbing it
… the way she would a radish”)
mostly saves her stories from
grimness, leaving the reader
curiously lighthearted.
Edward Snowden
Marie NDiaye
scientists will debate the embattled state of
democracy. Inspired in part by the 1935 International
Congress of Writers in Defence
of Culture and organised by the Peter Weiss
Foundation, the Congress opens with a marathon
English-language discussion entitled “The
Long Night of Democracy: the State of Affairs”.
The 18 participants include opening speaker and
globalization theoretician Arjun Appadurai (see
review), Polish publicist and former dissident
Adam Michnik, Argentinian digital activist and
co-founder of Open Collective Pia Mancini and –
over Skype, of course – Edward Snowden. Other
speakers over the following two days include
German artist Katharina Grosse (What Can Art
Do?), US-French social scientist Susan George
(Some are More Equal than Others) and a rare
appearance of GDR protest icon Wolf Biermann
talking one-on-one with Ulrich Schreiber on the
Friends and Foes of an Open Society.
DON’T FORGET THE EUROPEANS!
Following the success of his docu-fictive novel
Oorlog en Terpentijn (War and Turpentine),
named one of the 10 best books of 2016 by the
New York Times, Flemish writer Stefan Hertmans
has produced something
equally distinct in De Bekeerlinge.
An English translation
is in the pipeline but if you
want a head-start, catch Hertmans
presenting the German
translation Die Fremde (Sep
11, 21:00, see review). German
journalist Norman Ohler
caused an international ruckus
with Blitzed, his analysis of
drug use in the Third Reich.
Cleverly changing gear, his
latest work is a novel, Die Gleichung
des Lebens, which packs
John Valeron CC BY 4.0
a migrant narrative (Frederick the Great’s plans
to settle refugees on flood-liable land to the east
of Berlin) into thriller form (Sep 15, 21:00). Prizewinning
polyglot Marie NDiaye, a Berlin-based
novelist and playwright of French-Senegalese
descent, presents her latest foray into psychological
acuity in the original French: La cheffe, roman
d’une cuisinière (Sep 14, 19:30). In Die Hauptstadt
Austrian writer Robert Menasse’s multi-strand
narrative on the burial of Europe’s post-war
ghosts argues subtly for a Eurocratic continent –
albeit in desperate, mordant need of a personality
(Sep 6, 20:30). Finally, lauded French author and
playwright Yasmina Reza closes the festival with
a presentation of her latest novel Babylon (winner
of the 2016 Prix Renaudot), in which a late middle-aged
woman attends a seemingly innocuous
birthday celebration that opens the floodgates of
memory (Sep 16, 20:00). n
Charlotte Wood,
The Natural Way of Things
A group of young women find themselves in the
remote Australian outback, shorn and smocked
and forced into mind-numbing labour inside a
ferociously secured compound. The scenario
that Wood develops goes beyond Conrad
and Atwood, showing sexual conditioning as a
deeply ingrained deterrent to independent female
identity: these elementally revised women
finally get a shot at physical and emotional
freedom, but not all of them make the cut.
Enslavement and emancipation have seldom
felt so coupled, and so close.
Heike Steinweg
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