On the green grass rectangle in the backyard we’d been yearning for, my husband and I lay on our backs, eyes closed, limbs stretched, the achievement of first-time home-ownership relaxing our bodies into snow-angel position. Finally we were real grownups, so we took a moment to act like kids, our lives brimming with potential. That potential was mirrored by the house: three respectable floors with room for children, should we choose to have them, plenty of windows to let in the light, and a handful of eccentricities (like faucet handles screwed on the wrong way) that made us laugh.
I took it for granted, then, how much our new living space – outside of the predictable stress of moving – offered peace to our lives by requiring little of our attention. When things go right at the beginning of a new life chapter, it’s easy not to notice. But when things go wrong – as they do for Kirsty Bell’s family at the start of her wonderful new memoir/portrait-of-a-city, The Undercurrents, noticing becomes a survival strategy.
Bell’s story begins with a puddle on the kitchen floor. This kitchen belongs to the apartment in West Berlin to which she has recently moved with her husband and two young sons. And this puddle isn’t the first they’ve endured; from the get-go, the apartment had been busy springing water leaks, filling buckets, and sprouting brown water bruises on its walls. Whereas their last apartment in East Berlin had rarely drawn attention to itself, this one, Bell writes in a characteristically delightful bit of personification, “keeps forcing itself into the role of the protagonist.” Her marriage had already been buckling under the weight of gendered, divided labor, and now this puddle becomes the ultimate bad-omen/perfect-metaphor:
“Something had broken its banks and could no longer be contained. After years of emotional repression, subconsciously practiced to maintain a functional family life … this flood was a symbol of almost hysterical clarity. It asked for an equally extreme response, which duly came in a sudden, brutal and final break. A severing of the family unit, whereby one part was broken off and the other three parts remained together. My husband went away for work and never came back to our home.”
For Bell, the persistently faulty apartment leads to fixation, and an “uneasy and persistent feeling of intent.” There is, she feels, a message she’s meant to receive, but it soon becomes about more than just her marriage – the message has to do with the house itself. At the same time, the view from her kitchen window, which overlooks the nearby Landwehr Canal and a “patchwork of city history,” begins to enchant her. Crediting Louis Daguerre, who took the first photograph of a human being from his window in 1838, and the novelist Christopher Isherwood, who in Goodbye to Berlin writes from the view of his window, Bell doubles down on her fascination, making her own window a portal, an oracle, a more than literal opening. Not only will she read her cranky house like a mystical old book, uncracked for nearly 200 years, but she will also write about the place outside her window as a means “to make an anchor and counteract the drift.”
In the 2006 hit memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert famously heals from divorce by traveling to Italy, India, and Indonesia over the course of one enlightening year. With a less-expensive and more complex alternative, Bell finds her resolution by staying put, diving deep into the stories hidden around her. Perhaps a new absence of faith in the security of marriage awakens a more reliable faith in her own curiosity, which guides her on an impressively exhaustive, if occasionally over-zealous, search for knowledge.
When I first began reading The Undercurrents, knowing I would write this review, I felt sheepish about never having been to Berlin. I was paranoid that my lack of experience would make me an unqualified judge, as if reading a book about a place is not about discovery but about reaffirming what you already know. If you’re like me and know little of Berlin, I’m now convinced that our positioning is perfect. Because a.) It allows us to empathize with Bell’s own stultifying imposter syndrome; “My endeavour here to address this period of German history and poke around in a past that does not belong to me elicits shameful feelings of my own, of the ‘Who does she think she is?’ variety.” And b.) On a blank frame, Bell interweaves a marvelous tapestry, including a relatable ribbon of reasoning with her own self-doubt: “I am less a historian and more of a seamstress, stitching together scraps of evidence, loose threads and patches of meaning.”
Even if you do know something of Berlin and its history, Bell’s approach – close readings of history, maps, books, movies and art; meandering but productive strolls; and the employment of esoteric modalities, especially feng shui– offers a fresh, original perspective. Her threaded patches of meaning span from the days of Berlin as the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia in the early 1700s to the present, but The Undercurrents is not for point-A-to-point-B enthusiasts. While moving through history linearly, she is not dedicated to a straight path. In an early chapter, inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s “treatise on traveling by foot,” Wanderlust, Bell describes her walks on the banks of the Landwehr Canal outside of her home. Along the way, she encounters a bronze plaque commemorating socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxumberg’s passionate life, ended in murder by drowning. In allusive storytelling, this leads to Bell’s translation of lyrics to a Weimer-era song written about Luxumberg, which then leads to a passage on the storied Hotel Eden, where Luxumberg and her lover and partner Karl Liebknecht were taken after being arrested by the Freikorps, a right-wing paramilitary that evolved after World War I. Bell’s narration diverges, but bits of Luxumberg’s story resurface again and again, as do the drawings of Adolph Menzel, the landscape and city planning of Peter Joseph Lenné, the observations of Bell’s present-day feng shui master, Parvati, and many others. The past and the present, the personal and the political are interwoven, making her self-proclaimed title of seamstress particularly apt. She says, “All I can do is assess what is revealed to me piece by piece.”
Although this wandering quality sometimes makes the book read like a maze of who’s who and what’s what, the intriguing throughlines are grounding. There’s the end of Bell’s leaky marriage, of course, and its resultant self-examination, and perhaps more fascinatingly and representative of the work overall, there’s the story of a previous inhabitant, whom Bell discovers while researching her apartment building at the Land Registry Offices. The inhabitant was a little girl named Melitta, mysteriously adopted by Charlotte and Bruno Sala, members of a family of printmakers who occupied Bell’s building before and after World War II.
Bell’s search for information about Melitta’s life, and her informed imaginings about it, (“I picture [her] here, at the window, witnessing the incremental destruction of [her] neighborhood”), provide the foundation for a surprisingly cathartic closing chapter involving a sort of guided psychological seance. I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say it quickened my heartbeat, and made me even more smitten with Bell’s willingness to go a little out there, gathering documents and fact-based research on the same pages as feng shui “geomancy,” histories of paranormal research, and astrological readings from practitioners as colorfully drawn as fictional characters.
And speaking of divination, The Undercurrents, though claiming one author, sometimes has the ethereal feel of having been co-written. In one of many instances, Bell delightfully disorients the reader by describing, immediately in a chapter break following an excerpt from a letter to Lenin written by Luxumberg’s fellow socialist Clara Zetkin, the following:
“A rippling surface of water moves into a horizontal rush of lines, increasing in velocity, and cutting suddenly to an approaching steam locomotive. A tight crop of carriage windows passes by in a blur. Tracks, pistons, wheels: the rush of train travel brings us into the city from the outlying countryside.”
Only several dazzling, ekphrastic sentences later do we understand she’s describing the opening montage of Walter Ruttman’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of A Metropolis, which she uses to introduce the beginning of the Weimar Republic and its rebellions. The state of German women throughout history, another of Bell’s preoccupations, here is wholly-explored and thoughtfully self-reflected through the influx of feminism in the Weimar era, among others.
And what, through all this reading, researching, viewing, walking, writing, and divining, does Bell ultimately discover? What are the answers, revealed? Again, I won’t spoil it for you, and I can’t say if Bell’s work will satisfy the history buff more than the memoir lover more than the architecture and city-planning enthusiast; genre-bending is the beauty and the challenge of the hybrid form. While the memoir/confessional aspect of The Undercurrents left me craving a little more dirt on Bell’s ex-husband – late in the book she describes her first time seeing him at a gallery opening, a story-path too quickly rerouted by a description of the building he lived in at the time – but the historical/esoteric aspect offers a more unique and provocative afterthought, anyway: What if we all conjured more interest in our immediate surroundings? With a little curiosity and imagination, might we tap the undercurrents of our own houses and apartments, our neighborhoods and cities? If we consider our windows more closely, inviting in the buildings, the people, and ghosts they frame, might we enrich our interior lives, or find some unexpected form of healing? If The Undercurrents has one overarching – or should I say underflowing? — current, it might be of the self-help variety: When things fall apart, get curious. You never know what you might discover.
[Published by Other Press on September 6, 2022, 365 pages, $18.99 paperback. Originally published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (2022)]