Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin―its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina García brings the people of this famed city to life, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing.

An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character―vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace.

A meditation on war and mystery, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future. （Amazon）

加利西亚的这本新作构思十分灵巧，叙述时而睿智深刻，时而拨人心弦。主人公是一个古巴裔美国人，她在2013年来到柏林寻找故事。她惊讶地发现故事就藏在柏林这个城市很多意想不到的角落——公园，博物馆，咖啡屋，水族馆，史普利河畔。她从动物园园长儿子那里听到了3715个动物在二战期间的传说，她还和一个在纳粹育种计划期间诞生的人聊过天。她与一个“一生只离开过柏林一次”的柏林人畅谈，这个柏林人曾经为了纳粹政治宣传出国研究“南部黑人传道士的演讲技巧”，还作为战俘乘坐德国潜艇去过古巴。尽管这部作品很有WG·泽巴尔德的风格，但加尔西亚还是用自己的独到的方式，呈现了二战时期柏林发生的趣事。

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