On Julia Kornberg’s “Berlin Atomized”

According to some interpretations of Vedic cosmology, our solar system has reached its fourth and final age. We’ll experience gradual decline in the form of social alienation, natural disasters, ill health, atheism, and so on until the destruction of all of it after 51,840 years. And with a new cycle comes a Golden Age, where gods walk among men. My life changed a little when I learned about Kali Yuga at age eighteen, because I now had in my pocket the belief that the despair would and in fact must eventually let up. How to not suffer while still worldly attached, I do not know. But this strain of not-exactly-nihilism is in many ways a boon. It is present in the novel Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, in which three siblings hang out across the world in a near-apocalyptic slacker story that has the guts to describe atrocity with style.