Two New Novels Use Distant Times to Clarify Today’s Crises
Public Books examines Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery and Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized, arguing that both novels use dislocation across time and place to illuminate persistent forms of sexism, displacement, and political unraveling. The piece suggests their formal experiments help readers see crisis not as isolated rupture but as something structured by repeating patterns.
Public Books says two recently translated novels by Latin American writers are making a case for fiction’s usefulness in an age of overlapping crises. Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery and Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized, the essay argues, show how the novel can expose unexpected connections across eras and geographies without flattening their differences.
Crises seen from a distance
The article frames both books as formally ambitious works that refuse simple parallelism. Lijtmaer’s Cautery moves between contemporary Barcelona and 17th-century Massachusetts Bay, while Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized traces a family’s dispersal from suburban Buenos Aires into a speculative near future marked by political breakdown. In Public Books’ reading, each novel asks what fiction can reveal when it sets apparently separate moments side by side.
The article begins with Lijtmaer’s nonfiction book Ofendiditos, published in 2019, which surveys the rhetoric of people who present themselves as persecuted defenders of free speech while often using that stance to police others. It notes that Lijtmaer ranges from the Salem witch trials to social media disputes in Spain and includes figures such as Jordan Peterson among her examples. That earlier work, the essay suggests, helps explain the concerns that carry into Cautery.