What Do We Do With the Violence of Our Generation?

BERLIN ATOMIZED, Julia Kornberg’s extraordinary first novel, begins with an address to the reader: “If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009.” The Jewish girl in question is Nina Goldstein, one of the three Goldstein siblings who live in the wealthy gated community of Nordelta in Argentina. The baptisms are a near-obsessive bathing ritual, revealing a particular sense of teenage discomfort. “But 2009 was,” Nina writes, “the summer everyone began to disappear.”