This short novel moved me as much as it frustrated me. It’s also one that’s really played on my mind since I read it and suspect will make it onto my small list of rereads.
Plot in a Nutshell
Doris leaves her provincial town after stealing a fur coat and losing her office job, convinced she is meant for something brighter. Berlin, she believes, will make her a star. Instead, she drifts through rented rooms, bars and borrowed beds, surviving through charm, calculation and the temporary protection of men.
Thoughts
What worked most for me was Doris herself. In not very many pages I felt as though I knew her intimately. Her voice is breathless, impulsive, frequently funny. The long, run-on sentences, a signal that this is her notebook place us directly inside her excitable, dramatic, occasionally self-deluding mind. She changes topic quickly, obsesses over clothes, narrates her own myth-making in real time. There’s a highly performative “woman of the world” rhetoric to her reflections. Yet the novel quietly exposes how limited her routes upward are. In a society structured by patriarchy and class, her mobility depends almost entirely on men. Men who desire her, house her, feed her, and heartbreakingly discard her.
“how I might be able to get back on my feet, because when you rely on men completely, things are bound to go wrong.”
And yet, she is outmanoeuvred again and again. She shamelessly steals. She uses her sexuality both strategically but with a hint of desperation. But she is also painfully frank about the terms on which she is living.
“I wonder if there are men who can wait until you want to,”
There is a loneliness in this book, and I had to keep reminding myself that this is a young woman of just eighteen. I found myself wanting to feed her, house her, and go fight off her parade of men.
There is something deeply moving in watching her attempt to narrate herself into a sense of power while the material conditions of her life steadily narrow her choices. When she considers street-walking she ponders what it means to do that, to be without feeling and emotion. That level of moral and emotional perception, from someone who insists she is merely being practical. She may not be educated, but she is shrewd.
Reading it now carries the weight of the history that followed. Doris is captivated by Berlin: the nightlife, the crowds, the sense of a city partying hard. She sees glamour everywhere, places to be seen, people to impress, ideally money to burn. To a contemporary reader this all feels feverish and temporary – it’s hard not , to hear the Cabaret soundtrack playing in the background. And that is where the novel’s deepest sadness lies for me. It’s not just Doris and her narrowing choices, but in her starstruck love for a city already beginning to rot.
That atmosphere made this novella feel weightier. It made me think less about plot and more about a city partying hard to avoid the political rumblings.
The same stylistic choices that make the novel so impactful also made it tiring. The breathless delivery which helped me feel Doris’s mental speed and volatility, eventually began to grate. The run-on sentences and abrupt topic shifts became tedious and draining.
Similarly, the absence of clear chronology made it difficult to orient myself. I was never quite sure whether the narrative covered weeks or years. That ambiguity may well be deliberate but as a reader I found it disorienting and distracting. The novel moves from encounter to encounter without a strong sense of arc or visible development. Doris gains self-awareness, but not necessarily transformation.
The Artificial Silk Girl is not an easy read, nor are some of the topics comfortable to read about. It is however a precise portrait of a young woman trying to author her own life in a world that has already decided what she is worth.
Keun wrote it in 1932. The Nazis burned it the following year.