| It’s out! Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer? has arrived in store, in the elegance of an exclusive signed edition.
This is one of those rare creatures – a book that all five booksellers here have read and love. Libby is emoting her feelings about the novel above, and below is Leah’s review.
This debut novel by Polly Barton announces an extraordinary new talent in fiction whose probing, inquisitive voice simply fizzes with intelligence and charisma. At GRB we must confess to being good friends with Polly Barton. I even had the privilege of hearing an early draft of a section of the book (which went in pretty much unedited), and in what seemed like just a year later the book was done. I knew it would be good but was still blown away by just how good it was.
What Am I, a Deer? follows its protagonist to Germany where, despite not being into gaming, she takes up a job in a world-famous games company. Embarking on what she hopes will be a first step toward a career as a Japanese translator, she is also lured by the prospect of her own personal reinvention, to break free of the turmoil social dynamics plays on her mind. She parses out memories of school and cliques from college that have made her feel interminably at odds with her peers, who respond to glimpses of her scintillating inner-world with either awe or mockery. Her new life in Frankfurt offers a reset, maybe she will find an ease to her body and mind, maybe even amongst the alternative set of social values set forth by her gamer colleagues she will find her people?
One of the many wonderful aspects of this book is the style of writing that reads as if intrinsic with the shape of the young woman’s mind, and having established herself as a kind of ecstatic—an impassioned deep thinker—when she encounters a beautiful stranger on the tram in Frankfurt we know she’s in trouble. Hope for her reinvention falters as she falls into old obsessive patterns. She dives back into her mind, colouring her dreamscape by stealing glances at the stranger as she listens to music on her headphones and revels in the grip of desire, how it heightens her senses and sharpens her mostly dull days at the company.
The flowing prose of Barton’s writing is like a propeller, effecting what it is to be in this endlessly curious mind that turns over a broad scope of themes enlightening each it touches upon. As readers, we are rewarded along this journey by very funny anecdotes woven through what becomes a kind of logic of both her mind and the book. Connections come about from the feverish mode of thinking that continues to tap at the screen in order to reach what makes sense to her and her world. Most poignant, and entertaining, are the connections made between her practice of translation and her love of karaoke. Song lyrics splice up the chapters like jolts from the unconscious, they perform a kind of ‘karaoke logic’, that is, an invitation of her own making to succumb to what it is to be wild, desiring, naive, unselfconscious, enraptured, or possessed. This book is a spellbinding enquiry into the self and one’s place in the world and remains wholly authentic throughout even at its most playful and outlandish. |
