Now the 51-year-old author of The Wallcreeper is a star pocketing six-figure advances and championed by Jonathan Franzen (she thinks his writing is ‘square’) Paula Cocozza meets the literary badass in Berlin From behind, Nell Zink resembles a disaffected teenage boy. She scuffs down the pavement in flared jeans, an old hoodie. Today, she got a royalty statement for her first novel – $12,000 – but her shoulders are hunched and head bowed in the universal posture of the dropout Fred is the friend Zink stays with on trips to Berlin which is where she prefers to meet visiting journalists 50 miles away in the small town of Bad Belzig And then she explains: “I got my sweater ripped yesterday by this Nazi chick.” sounds like a joke or the start of an incredibly long story Zink doesn’t do brevity; she says things like: “To cut a long story long …” It is one of her many paradoxes that both her published novels are extremely short the literary heavyweight who became her pen pal and the novel’s first reader No one expected Rembrandt to spend 10 years on a fucking painting He could do it in a day and a half.For Zink “No one expected Rembrandt to spend 10 years on a fucking painting,” she says to be able to do it in a day and a half.” She compares her own composition process to “a cuckoo clock .. and then everything lines up and the cuckoo comes out and says its piece.” She does a little trill To judge the scale of publishing’s infatuation with Zink consider that after selling the latest book “She sounded like she was on the phone to tell [me] she had a diagnosis of lung cancer,” Zink says Like a lot of Zink’s apparent exaggerations, the “Nazi chick” turns out to be real (though not actually a Nazi). Zink won’t talk about it, she says, before launching into a detailed retelling of the woman’s placard; the woman’s claim to be marching on behalf of Jewish members of Pegida Germany’s burgeoning anti-Muslim protest group an infringement for which she was held by a policeman for 45 minutes This was and was not a big deal: she dislikes stress the policeman released her after Zink proved her identity by Googling her own name and showing him the results on her phone that escape route would have been unavailable they would not have found a photo of me online.” The Wallcreeper came out in the US to rave reviews The New York Times called it “a very funny very strange work of unhinged brilliance – rude sex comedy meets environmental tract” Franzen himself said the book “insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know” The story of how Zink met “Agent Franzen” – she wrote to him through Macmillan and received a longhand reply – is already the stuff of publishing folklore who is American and grew up in rural Virginia “The part about the birds gets lost in this narrative because nobody gives a flying fuck about it,” she says to draw his attention to the plight of the pristine wetlands of Albania where hunters prevailed The other thing that happened is that Franzen wrote back to Zink Because I wasn’t really in touch with any native English speakers outside my immediate family And then all of a sudden I’m getting a compliment on my writing for the first time in 25 years “And that was when he put his foot down and said for me.’” Her hands have been folded over her brow in an improvised peak against the sun she leaps up and wheels around so the sun is at her back Zink in Berlin Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt/The GuardianZink is a curious mixture She is feted but firmly outside the literary establishment tucked away in Bad Belzig with a partner she refers to as “Mystery Boy” unafraid to deliver damning judgments for the sake of honesty She had not read his work when she wrote to him square conservative work of a guy who is not really stodgy She dismisses A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan as “in one ear and out the other”, and this month’s fictional debut of publishing legend Jonathan Galassi “has the same flaws as everybody else’s first novel” apparently unaware that Shriver is a woman because Zink’s brand is built on being an outsider she probably would have felt obliged to consider plot which is not something that holds her back in The Wallcreeper (She had no idea of the story when she started.) Each sentence feels like a long journey diverted This is how The Wallcreeper begins: “I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved Mislaid, the second novel, is a story of concept more than character. Its protagonist is a gay female student who has children with a gay male poet. The student flees with a child to the south, where they pretend to be black (prescient, given last week’s revelations about Rachel Dolezal) but impossible not to wonder how much further it might have gone if Zink had given it more time Both books are a take on the coming-of-age novel but perhaps not those written in middle age Zink was 47 when she drafted The Wallcreeper and the death of her mother (“She encouraged me a lot she also thought I sucked”) somehow freed her to write for the first time with public She created “art for art’s sake”: novelistic letters to friends; a fanzine called Animal Review to which indie-rock artists contributed prose about their favourite animals (Steve Albini wrote about lemurs.) And all while making a living variously as a masonry repair worker (She sweated far too much.) And then finally along came Franzen maybe writing for an audience was its own coming of age “I hope you’re not going to ramble on about my mother!” Zink exclaims. She is aggrieved that the New Yorker’s interviewer did that because a Paris Review article refers to “riotous “I snapped at that shithead because he deserved not to be snapped It is interesting to see how Zink’s anger carries her to a completely different place as if in some kind of intellectual atonement for loss of temper and it’s going to be online for the rest of the existence of the universe Because the rivers are where they get the power to run the fuckin’ cloud,” she says then stops before proceeding with deliberate emphasis “I’m just angry because they are damming rivers in Oregon to run server farms for Amazon and Google.” She is glaring intently as if only a moron would think this conversation had ever been about anything else you just never know where Zink is going to take you We use cookies to personalize content and ads and to analyze our traffic and improve our service The book was a revelation: a (relatively) traditional story about a disintegrating marriage told in a voice that was mature You never knew from one clause to the next where it would go An early scene of very bad sex set the tone “He knelt across my chest and eventually sort of fucked my mouth Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana—not that three isn't enough but that the three on offer aren't enough to sustain a marriage?” The book was a smash hit for Dorothy and the New Yorker published a lengthy profile of Zink in advance of her next novel,Mislaid The weirdness of this editorial decision can best be summed up by counting the other novelists profiled that year by the venerable magazine a fast-paced book about a group of young anarchists living in a Jersey City squat B-A-D B-E-L-Z-I-G—about an hour south of Berlin KG How did you come to be in this faraway place There are about four different true versions of it and I had decided to leave the software company where I was working They were scheduled to pay a big bonus on the fifteenth of May I took this huge bet just to show off—I think I have the supernatural power of knowing what corporations are going to do And then I got on a plane and went to Germany because a friend of mine had a nice little apartment—no (laughter) I moved into this dark room and never looked back Except to move to Germany about three years ago combined with cute animals that I thought were nice and I would review the animals as if they were 7-inch singles I tended to take sort of an ethical view of bands and their songs so I thought I could analyze and assess animals based on their ethical qualities So a baby lamb would get a way better review than KG Because they're ugly or because they're mean They kick other animals out of their burrows and move in The answer is I was putting out my zine and someone at the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an article about it which happened to include my email address so I got a lot of emails in the days following its appearance A scholar visiting from Israel named Zohar Eitan saw the article and wrote to me His emails really stood out because he's quite an accomplished poet when you are spontaneously charmed by a person's writing it turns out that they work in advertising But this guy was an actual honest-to-goodness poet He was in Israel at the time—he had already gone back for winter break our first date was a drive from Philly to San Diego and back And he kept telling me he thought it would be like a cross between the Sophie Calle film No Sex Last Night and Paul Auster's The Music of Chance Calle decides that she's going to drive across the United States with this random guy and has a drug problem or something—it doesn't go well She says: “No sex last night.” And you just keep thinking Why on earth does she expect any sex from this guy these two friends go somewhere out in the country and they get enslaved by this crazed upper-class farmer He chains them up or something and makes them work on his farm These are the predictions that were made for our first date NZ If you can call moving to Tel Aviv being saved you've been out of the US for more than twenty years One thing is that I notice the changes in American culture The dynamism is very evident when you're coming back every six or ten months It really strikes you in a way that it doesn't strike people to whom it's just a gradual process everything in the United States has been turned on its head in the last twenty years The combination of ghettoization and paranoia after 9/11 is striking and it was an odd place to have been for an American NZ Just because it has been a very significant chapter in our nation's history Everybody thought it didn't get any better and safer than the US of A and there was no reason to think of the country as being run by fuck-ups KG I know you have very strong feelings about American literary culture I'm stuck comparing it to German literary culture where everything just happens twenty years later You still have a lot of publishers in Germany but people still work full-time as writers because there's state support for artists So I look over at the US and see a situation that I know you're very familiar with because you've written about the divide between the culture of the MFA programs and the New York writing world relatively simple novels that read to me like young-adult fiction Either that or it's some impenetrable prose poem full of modernist experiments I can't make head or tail of which I'm expected to like and be interested in because I'm arty and I'm sort of glad that I don't cry wolf I can completely commit myself to liking it and telling everybody about it which is good because I'm really bad at that observing this sort of corrupt and debased literary culture I read a book today about the war in Croatia and a large part of it is from the point of view of a ten-year-old This is a very common motif in American literature We have to have the naïve point of view of a child so that no one can call us on our lack of depth and subtlety I give a lot of credit to people who try to write grown-up books for grown ups but I think that because the books that are YA-like are more popular those are the ones about which people tell me you've got to read this book.” And then I read one I feel like I'm gnawing on the rind of contemporary American literature and I haven't found the actual fruit KG Yet it was a literary culture that you nonetheless agreed to join it was very important to me that I get in there and take part in the spoils of decadence you've had one of the most interesting literary careers in recent memory I feel like there are people who start publishing late but they're often editors or lawyers or something and they're in New York; and then there are people who start from afar and the way in which you've been immediately—and rightly NZ I really have no idea who the competition might be in that race I'm glad to be interesting because it's my job to sell some books Being interesting is one of the ways I can do that because other avenues (laughter) I have to hit them with something else But I was thinking about your career in terms of The Natural It starts with a very young Robert Redford getting off a train or maybe somebody else getting off near a train I guess they used to get off the train and have a quick baseball game or something KG So young Robert Redford throws a very fast pitch And then she shoots him in the stomach with a silver bullet until one day an older Robert Redford shows up at some baseball team's headquarters to try out He makes the team even though he's much older than all the other players but the wound from the silver bullet lays him low in the end but I've only recently realized that it is actually a parable for domesticity KG The book was written by Bernard Malamud KG It's about having talent as a young writer and then being sucked into the trap of domesticity which is almost the amount of time it takes for your child to grow up and leave the house I think it's a story that men tell themselves NZ It also plays a role in the lives of men who want to be responsible dads and be involved with their kids KG You can only be so responsible as a dad NZ Are you alluding to the fact that I have no children are about brilliant women who have to liberate themselves from charismatic men in order to accomplish anything KG So I also thought of Nell Zink as a kind of character You clearly have always had a lot of talent but it has taken a bit longer for you than it does for most people to publish it I felt a great deal of hesitation and fear and I assumed that I would never publish anything—it doesn't make sense to me now it's hard to go back into that kind of mental territory I don't want to go into detail about what kind of struggle and I was always having these little epiphanies where I would think I'm thirty-one and I've finally figured it out (laughter) I constantly felt I was always just finally getting life right or maybe I should say I was out of my mind in a very sane way where I was just sitting down and thinking hard about everything I could figure out about life and then drawing conclusions I have these little notebooks with diagrams in them One of these has three points that are something like vanity I decided that those were probably the three things that mattered the most to me (laughter) Or things that had to be taken into account for me to be happy It was a very cynical observation about my own behavior actually a question of having a porch or not of being able to live the way I liked to live when I was young in the South It was really clear to me that if I wanted to live in these Northeastern and European cities and that the sacrifices I would have to make to get a porch to get the real-estate corner of this triangle I would have had to go out and work full-time doing something where I would be spending forty hours per week in contact with people who had no interest in me So at the end of this page with the diagram on it we're not going to have a porch.” I've never since then given any thought to the quality of my domicile This kind of weird rationality has definitely played a role in my life “You're the only person I know who thinks things through first and then has emotions about the results.” I'll admit that it's something people rightfully see in the character of Tiff in The Wallcreeper It would depend on how much other work I was doing When I was working as a secretary in New York after I got fourteen thousand words together so my fiction output was a short story every three months they're in the collection of the New York Public Library My husband worked there as a librarian in the general reference division—you know the branch with the lions on the front steps they didn't house it in the main reading room with Diderot's Encyclopedia They stuffed it in a box and sent it out to a warehouse in New Jersey given that it's the New York Public Library there are a couple of ways of telling that story I didn't know I would be writing a novel that quickly after Mislaid So it's very much a record of what was going through my mind in March of 2015 I had just been in New York for a couple weeks there's going to be a brief window of time after the appearance of the New Yorker profile and before the publication of Mislaid—before there are any sales figures for it—when your market value may reach an all-time high So if you had a manuscript for me in those first few days of May...” I could do that and because of things that had been on my mind from people I'd been talking to in New York—I'd met up with Jonathan Franzen a couple of times and he was really obsessed with trying to write for television—the first draft of Nicotine wasn't even subtitled A Novel and my idea was to have an adorable cast of characters that viewers can follow from season to season The book would be the script for the pilot KG There are lots of books that run in series A friend in Berlin sometimes sits me down in front of the computer and makes me watch Mad Men He once even made me watch Game of Thrones which is just really mind-blowingly bad soft-core porn My agent got me to talk to this author she was working with who had quit the movie business to write novels because there's no money in movies anymore So when I was drafting the new book initially I set strict rules for myself It's just going to be dialogue and visual descriptions of what we see and I wrote the whole book—except for the ending I sort of storyboarded it in Microsoft Word and then wrote out what people were seeing KG Like a graphic novel without the pictures NZ This turned out to be a really efficient method for writing a fast-moving And then I went back and learned—I learned a lot It was like a strange little course in novel writing I ended up really respecting people like Franzen who will have a line of dialogue and then two pages of cogitation and then have another line of dialogue and two more pages of cogitation KG Are you saying that the decision to set it among young anarchists in Jersey City as opposed to birders in Germany or Southern misfits or whatever that was material that was floating around in my head from my life in West Philly and I had just seen those people and heard wonderful stories the kind of real drama that can happen when you have a close community of people who work with each other and do everything else with each other all the time It's like in The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley The reduction in the cast of characters makes things more dramatic KG It's always very hard to depict people like that and you pull it off without making fun of them and also without making them so serious and self-important that they seem ridiculous I let that milieu take shape in my mind and then invented people to put into it people who were based on characters I've known from very different situations has a niece named Maayan who's an unbelievably charming girl and when I was in New York I spent a day with her walking around in Washington Square Park and visiting Greenwich Village cafés She was so wonderful and vulnerable and interesting and smart and she had these terrible scars from cutting her wrists I'd like to try to put her in a book because somebody should Maayan should be the one putting herself in a book— she's a poet—but I've spent so much time since I started making money as a writer yelling at other people to just get to 200 pages Just make it 200 pages long and call it a novel Maayan is a writer and a very fascinating person and she has nothing whatsoever to do with West Philly anarchism So there was no way for me to satirize anybody I knew plenty of people in West Philly I could satirize the living tar out of KG It's pretty rare in American fiction that someone is sympathetic to anarchists and not just in American fiction—in the history of literature in Chekhov—young people with ideas don't generally come off very well NZ I flatter myself that it works for me because I'm bad at talking about my ideas and clearly expressing what I think and believe But I feel like I'm very good at picking up on people's speech patterns and recognizing political stances based on minor differences in word choice I felt like I could make these people bright and interesting and on the left without—except in very isolated cases—making them say that's where they are KG I wanted to ask you about the men in your books but the poet Lee Fleming in Mislaid and the husband in The Wallcreeper are also monstrous I feel like you have a certain amount of forgiveness for these guys NZ I was thinking about that the other night and almost feeling guilty It seems to me like it's interesting being a man you don't have anything you can point to to explain why you don't have it all I'm relatively tall and I don't dress in a feminine way until they figure out that I'm also a person who has been affected by sexism I grew up in the Tidewater region of Virginia and I wasn't taken seriously in part because I was a girl I can say that just from seeing the boys I knew who were taken seriously in college They're often struggling with issues of power and responsibility We're used to women being conciliatory and propitiating men You told me a few months ago that you had had a different ending to the book and then you changed it but there's this certain “one true couple” in the book and I had them not getting together because it just seemed wrong to reward them Then it came to my attention that not having them get together felt very tacked-on as an ending almost like the sort of thing that would have been ordered for a Hollywood movie in the 1930s under the Hays Code or something It took me five weeks of meditation and working on other things in the novel to finally get my head around the idea that I could write in that direction Then it turned out to be so much fun and I was so happy write a short story.” People with magazines I'm deliberately hanging back because I feel like I want it to be something ambitious I could do some research before I write anything again I learned so much writing Nicotine that I'm much less afraid of trying to do something long and ambitious But I think if you write one that's 400 pages (laughter) Like if you have two settings instead of one you do what all novelists do when they get a big advance—come up with dream destinations you can use as material Like put the word Orinoco in your book so you can deduct a cruise up the Orinoco Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker In response to restrictive COVID-19 measures a Sierra Leonean man in Germany's Bad Belzig is winning the hearts of the townsfolk by becoming a beekeeper He's already turning his venture into a sweet success Christopher O'Neill has moved far in his life he has been living in Bad Belzig near Germany's capital Berlin for over 20 years You have selected an article from the AllAfrica archive, which requires a subscription. You can subscribe by visiting our subscription page. Or for more information about becoming a subscriber, you can read our subscription and contribution overview You can also freely access - without a subscription - hundreds of today's top Africa stories and thousands of recent news articles from our home page » AllAfrica publishes around 500 reports a day from more than 110 news organizations and over 500 other institutions and individuals representing a diversity of positions on every topic We publish news and views ranging from vigorous opponents of governments to government publications and spokespersons Publishers named above each report are responsible for their own content which AllAfrica does not have the legal right to edit or correct Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. To address comments or complaints, please Contact us Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox By submitting above, you agree to our privacy policy please follow the instructions in the email we just sent you There was a problem processing your submission After the shock of the New Year’s Eve assaults some migrants are trying to teach refugees about the challenges of life in Germany and about mutual tolerance Skinny-dipping, gay relationships and parenting all form part of Magdi Gohary’s crash-course introduction to a strange new home, Learn to Understand Germany given at a huge refugee camp on the outskirts of Munich Many of those who join his seminars headed to the country in search of security and gave little thought to what else awaited them there a retired chemist who left his native Egypt for Munich half a century ago which a lot of my course members tend to see as criminal I go on to explain to them that Germans don’t see it that way and that they will have to accept that if they want to live here,” he says They are warned that their children will have more independence if they grow up German than they might have expected in the Arab world “Arabs are often shocked here when they see the Bavarians go swimming naked in the River Isar But I tell them that if they want the Germans to accept Arab women wearing headscarves then they must accept Germans sunbathing and swimming naked in public parks and rivers.” In the wake of mass assaults on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve – which police believe were largely carried out by men of Arab and North African backgrounds including several asylum seekers – Germany is being pushed into a public debate about the challenges of integration The conversation is a delicate one. Refugees those who work with them and the millions of Germans who support chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming new arrivals are all very wary of giving more ammunition to far-right groups who have already made political capital from the attacks But many are also frustrated by assumptions that it would take little more than a change of clothes and passports for new arrivals to settle in and say the conversation is a very necessary one for Germans and refugees alike Just giving a refugee a donated jumper will not turn them into a German citizen That needs time and both sides must approach each other with flexibility.” a 36-year-old pharmacist from Damascus who has organised a petition condemning the attacks readily admits that it has taken him time to adjust to his new home “There is so much to learn about everyday life Often it is little things such as respecting red traffic lights and not talking too loud in public Just live by the rules like the Germans,” he says Those challenges do not explain what happened in Cologne though who has spent days travelling around refugee camps in the Ruhr valley to collect signatures for the open letter in English Arabic and German that he hopes to deliver to Merkel this week “We abhor the sexual assaults and incidents of theft putatively perpetrated by migrants and refugees,” says the letter he drafted along with two other Syrians and a Pakistani to ensure that such crimes as were committed in Cologne will neither be repeated nor the hospitality of the Germans be abused.” Refugees from Syria in Germany carry signs saying ‘Syrian refugees against sexual harassment’ to distance themselves from the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne Photograph: Oliver Berg/EPAThere have been other spontaneous examples of public atonement including campaigns to hand out leaflets and white roses with notes of apology by refugees worried that the acts of a small group of men will be twisted to smear hundreds of thousands and harden government policy on new arrivals “What happened was deplorable and unacceptable,” said Ghreeb Baccko a 29-year-old Syrian who has recently arrived in the country “I am afraid that these assaults could affect the way German society looks at migrants especially as they could be used as an argument by opponents of the refugee welcome policy Every day I read news about tightening residency measures.” Many refugees are as keen as Merkel’s most hardline allies to see harsh penalties handed down to the attackers Punishment of the perpetrators would protect both German women and the reputation of most refugees Refugees have already been attacked by newly formed vigilante groups which have sprung up in recent weeks with names like Altstadt-Spaziergang (“Stroll through the Old Town”) and Block 4 Germans who back Merkel’s policy and refugees themselves are fighting back from lawyers tackling the swimming pool ban to others monitoring vigilantes But with thousands of people still registering daily for asylum in a country only starting to explore difficult questions of integration even some of Merkel’s supporters suggest Germany may struggle to cope if it does not halt or slow the pace of new arrivals a 44-year-old engineer from Morocco who did not want to give his first name but says the country cannot keep welcoming them at the rate of recent months “Merkel’s ‘Willkommenskultur’ [welcoming culture] was right up to a point She should adjust her course to limit the inflow of migrants,” he said some Germans seem more afraid of people they think might be foreigners and as a result he is making “small changes” to his life He will be skipping the city’s carnival this year because of worries about exposing his two young children to violence and racism “I would be concerned that the situation this year might be more tense than in the past And I don’t want any trouble with drunk people who might say something offensive when they see someone foreign-looking.” worries that the Germans who welcomed them so enthusiastically also paid too little heed to the challenges of adapting to a very different country while refugees expect more than an overwhelmed German state can provide “Unrealistic expectations must be reconciled on both sides,” he says but he sees hope in the fact that most refugees are eager to embrace their new home and learn about even its most unexpected features “After the seminars the participants always come and ask when we could hold another such course,” said Gohary “It is one of my goals now to recruit more people who could hold similar seminars because the curiosity of all these young refugees just shows what a huge need there is for that.” This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025 The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media.