The Weakest Friendship In Berlin

In Berlin by Eric Silberstein

Goodreads Giveaway Win

Pages: 333 Genre: literary fiction

Rating: 1.5 Star

Software engineer Anna Werner's life changes forever one day when, randomly on her commute, she experiences a spinal stroke that paralyzes her, leaving her with only limited function in her right arm. Suddenly, Anna feels her autonomy and personhood ripped away from her. The only person in the hospital who treats her like a person is Batul al-Jaberi, an aspiring doctor from Syria who is working as a janitor in the hospital. She is trying to restart her life after fleeing from persecution in her home. The two women strike up a friendship, and when it goes deeper than they expected, their ideas of relationships are challenged in ways they never expected.

I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway, and it took me a long time to read it because it just wasn't grabbing my attention. In a lot of ways the book was just fine, but the execution was really lacking.

Unfortunately, I'm also just not in a place to accept AI being praised in literary fiction that isn't creating a separate reality that changes it to be more ethical. Why were we including a random conversation asserting how cool it is that AI can be creative. Newsflash: it can't! It just steals from real artists, even in the example given.

The epilogue also shows characters very casually using AI in the future (by assessing random people on the street and giving you facts about them, by the way, which is super creepy). I looked at the author's Twitter account, and he was definitely in favor of ChatGPT in 2023. Granted, feelings could change, but the text implies otherwise. Hopefully he doesn't actually use it in his writing and just wrote the character to enjoy it.

Onto the book itself, I just found it really bland. The narration could sometimes be very beautiful, but it did also have a tendency to feel incredibly stilted. And there was far too much focus on making the narration either artful or reflective and not on telling the story. Characterization and dialogue were sidelined, which was a bad call for a character driven novel.

The writing of Anna and Batul was confusing. It felt like they were meant to both be main characters, but the book was a lot more centered on Anna's experiences. Everything that made Batul into a person was done in service to Anna's character; even her biggest conflicts were positioned as things that were primarily affecting Anna, not Batul herself. It felt weird to see her so sidelined, especially considering how heavy her story really was.

Again: while I was reading this book, most of it was just fine. Nothing remarkable, but fine. But by the end, I couldn't get over all of its quirks that just highlighted how unimpressive the writing was.