What Am I, A Deer? - Polly Barton
What Am I, A Deer? is on this year's Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, and it's the third book from the list that I've read. The team at Fitzcarraldo were kind enough to send me a copy, which I'm very grateful for.
This is Polly Barton's debut novel, but she's far from a new writer. She's a translator, and I've read a couple of her translations already - Spring Garden and Butter - and thought they were both really good. So it was nice to finally read something that's entirely her own.
I'm really into fiction written by translators that deals with the act of translation. There have been a handful of these in recent years, a sort of tiny micro-genre, and I've enjoyed every one of them. This one goes straight onto that list.
We follow a young woman, a literary translator, who ends up working for a games company in Frankfurt doing localisation work. While she's there we watch her get to know the people and the culture, and try to settle into a new life in a country where she doesn't really speak the language and doesn't feel like she fits. The book slips back and forth between past and present, and it's told in an almost stream-of-consciousness style that I found really engaging. It put me right inside the narrator's head, and inside her emotions.
When I first opened this I found it pretty intimidating. The first page is one big wall of text, and my first thought was: where the fuck are the paragraph breaks? What the hell is going on here? It's not often that a book intimidates me. It took me back to studying modernism at uni, ploughing through things like Finnegans Wake and Mrs Dalloway and The Death of Virgil, and for a second I wondered what I'd got myself into.
It does have paragraph breaks, you'll be pleased to know. And it's actually a very approachable book. It's nicely written, it's really funny in places, and it's practically a rom-com. But it also does some interesting things with form, and that's what I enjoyed most about it.
There are no real chapters. Instead the text is broken up every so often by song titles and lyrics (at one point it's Lana Del Rey's Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have), and these almost function as chapter breaks. Almost, but not quite. Sometimes they mark a stopping point in the narrative, and things change straight after them. Other times they just interrupt, and the story carries on as if nothing happened.
I found that really effective. To me it seemed to be pointing at the way we narrativise our own lives, poking at the artifice of fiction and the whole idea of chapters. Your life doesn't really have chapters. You can look back and pick out the moments where things changed, the thresholds you stepped through, the landmarks that shape the story you tell yourself about who you are. But when you're actually living them they're just another moment. Nothing seems to be changing at the time.
It felt to me like a companion piece, or maybe a counterpoint, to Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection, which I also loved and which also happens to be published by Fitzcarraldo. Both are about very modern people trying to work out how to live in the modern world while cut off from home, whether that's their country, their language, or the people they know and love. But where Perfection leans into the alienation and loneliness of the digital age, What Am I, A Deer? is much more interested in connection, and specifically the small, mundane, personal kind. There's a big emphasis on karaoke, of all things, as a way of connecting with people that cuts across language and class and nationality. I loved that.
To be fair to it, any book I read from the Goldsmiths shortlist this year was always going to suffer a bit, because I read The Rouse first and loved it so much. But I really, really enjoyed this. It's exactly my kind of novel, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Polly Barton does next.
Thanks again to Fitzcarraldo for the copy. If you've read this I'd love to hear what you thought, and if you haven't, I think you should give it a go.