Contrary to what the title suggests, Helene Hegemann’s story collection Schlachtensee is not set in southwest Berlin. Her 15 stories take us to different parts of the world, to different people, all loosely connected. There’s Esther, surfing on the Atlantic coast of France and reflecting upon a lot, namely her father’s cancer. There is Ketti, trundling through the Austrian countryside by train on Christmas morning, having slept through the night. The stories lead to the Volga, to Kitzbühel, to a garden in South Carolina and to a hotel room on the Nile. Cleverly and clearly, Hegemann describes the contradictions and pain, but also the vulnerability and openness with which her characters drift through life. The protagonist in Sloane Crosley’s new novel Cult Classic is also adrift: Lola, a newly-engaged journalist in her late 30s, runs into one of her ex-boyfriends in New York’s Chinatown and doesn’t think much of it – until she meets another former love the next day, and another the day after that. That these encounters are no coincidence becomes clear by the time her former boss (previously an editor, now a self-declared health guru and millionaire) tells her that he has founded a new start-up. It’s supposed to help people get over breakups – and Lola was chosen as its first test subject.
The fact the book doesn’t resemble a bad episode of Black Mirror is due to Lola’s wit, her skepticism, and the wicked observations that take aim at everything that is hip and current. In the end, it seems, the only constant in Lola’s life is the city in which she lives. Lola shares this lostness with the characters in Hanna Bervoets’ new novel, We Had To Remove This Post. The setting here is Hexa, a fictional company that evaluates and moderates content for a major online platform. In 2017, The Guardian published an article on the criteria used by Facebook to delete online posts and the burden that this work places on moderators. This is where Bervoets’ story comes in: using impressively unfazed language, it shows a world of disturbing images, human abysses and inhumane working conditions. In the middle of it all is Kayleigh, a young woman who is not so much disturbed by the horrific videos and photos she sees, but rather the behavior of her colleagues. The boundaries of the virtual and analog worlds blur, and Kayleigh gets so lost in the moment that she doesn’t notice that she is getting carried away by conspiracy narratives.
Text: Laura Storfner / Cover: Cult Classic / Photos: Cottonbro, Tima Miroshnichenko & Francesca Meni
Schlachtensee: Stories by Helene Hegemann (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2022, 266 pages, in German)
Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux MCD, 2022, 304 pages)
We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets (Hanser Berlin, 112 pages)
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