Gail Jones's A Guide to Berlin (2015) tells the story of Cass Turner, a young Australian woman who turns up in Berlin on New Year's Day with the vague intention, she says, of writing. What exactly she intends to write is never made clear, and the reader is only given a few clues here and there as to her background. She claims to be from Sydney, for instance, although she is actually from a remote rural community, and her family looks down on her for having followed a boy to London, her sojourn to Berlin following on the heels of the dissolution of that relationship.

Berlin in winter turns out to be bitterly cold and lonely, but Cass makes a new friend while visiting the house where Nabokov once lived. It is there that she meets Marco, a handsome Italian man, who lives in sight of the house and befriends people visiting there. He invites her to join a group of expatriates who meet to discuss the influence of Nabokov's life and work. The group is made up of Victor, an English professor from New Jersey, Yukio, a Japanese man who used to be a hikikomori, Mitsuko, a former Lolita girl who helped Yukio overcome his condition and is now his girlfriend, and Gina, a friend of Marco's, also from Italy.

The group decides to participate in a "speak-memory," named after Nabokov's 1951 collection of autobiographical pieces, in which each meeting will involve one of the group's members sharing a life-changing moment in their life.

At the first such event, Victor recalls his parents, who both survived Auschwitz and immigrated to America. Victor's father worked in an umbrella factory, and after his death his mother became quite peculiar. Victor used to soothe himself by whispering "umbrella, umbrella," replicating a scene from Nabokov's autobiography. After his mother's death, he lived on the streets, but was rescued by a Jewish woman named Leah Rabinovich, who gave him a copy of Nabokov's Lolita.

At the second meeting, Yukio recounts how he was traumatized by the sarin gas attacks that took place in the Tokyo subway in 1995, even though he lived far away. Mitsuko overlaps her story with Yukio's telling how she comes from a rural area named Hagi, and was born into a family of potters. However, she grew up to be a Lolita girl after moving to Tokyo. She hired herself out as a kind of sister/counselor, which is how she met Yukio.

At the fourth meeting, Gino tells how his father was killed by a political bombing at a train station. Gino was emotionally traumatized by his father's death, and has turned to drugs as part of his downward spiral, although he has been clear for a while.

Cass's is the fifth story. She recounts some random memories of life in Australia, but excludes her most important memory: the death of her brother Alexander, who died while trying to rescue the family dog during a cyclone.

The various "speak-memory" parts are punctuated with scenes from Cass's life, particularly her burgeoning love affair with Marco, including an awkward date at the Pergamon Museum when he has an epileptic fit, Gino's creepy attempts at seduction, and a trip to the zoo with Victor. At the zoo, the two of them might have seen the same tortoise that Nabokov saw when he visited.

The story takes a bizarre turn at a later meeting at Cass's house. Gino, back on drugs, throws Victor off her balcony, killing him. The group, enlisting the help of the building manager, Karl, and his epileptic son, Franz, disposes of the body instead of reporting it to the police. Later, Gino commits suicide at Marco's place by overdosing on drugs. Marco arranges to meet with Cass, but he never shows up.

Jones wrote A Guide to Berlin as the result of a fellowship she spent there. Unfortunately, there is no critical distance from either the city nor Nabokov: both are forced down the reader's throat as being of unquestionable brilliance, but without ever providing a way for us to understand this for ourselves. This is not Nabokovian writing - it is faux-Nabokov, for although it deploys some of his methods, it removes their ironic core. Nabokov is always playing with us as readers, whereas Jones is deadly (and dully) serious throughout. ( )

What, no fives? Maybe it's for a certain kind of reader who loves clever metaphor and literary allusions. Whatever, I LOVED this book. The descriptions of Berlin's winter are accurate and profoundly evocative. The story is engaging, varied and dramatic by turns. Gail Jones is one of our great writers. I look forward to reading her more. ( )

http://shawjonathan.com/2016/05/13/gail-joness-guide-to-berlin/ ( )

A fascinating puzzle of a book. ( )