How do supposedly passionate and frequently conservative defenders of free speech somehow position themselves as victims? Why can they feel so threatened by the circulation of ideas they don’t agree with that they end up policing precisely what they proclaim to promote? These conservatives, as Lucía Lijtmaer suggests in her 2019 nonfiction work Ofendiditos, often object to the censure they face from the “little offended ones,” a term of disdain for feminists and others on the left; these they accuse of a new puritanism that takes political correctness a step too far. In her book, Lijtmaer traces a wide-ranging history of such pernicious discourses mobilized by ostensibly aggrieved groups who nevertheless wield considerable influence. (Jordan Peterson, for instance, figures among the Anglophone examples that she cites of this troubling trend.) Born in Buenos Aires but raised in Barcelona and now residing in Madrid, Lijtmaer recounts the witch trials of Salem in the 17th century as easily as she dissects social media dustups in Spain in the 21st century.
Lijtmaer later published Cauterio, a novel from 2022 that splices similar periods and places and that now appears in English as Cautery in Maureen Shaughnessy’s careful translation. Freed from the strictures of nonfiction but still striving to signal how some problems persist across centuries and geographies, Lijtmaer adroitly alternates two narratives of women confronting difficult circumstances: one is set in contemporary Barcelona, and the other around the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s. As an exploration of collocation that rejects the need for regular connections, the novel does not so much entwine the two narratives as offer occasional glimpses of a common thread running through each.
Whereas Lijtmaer toggles between past and present, Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized—dexterously co-translated by Jack Rockwell and the author—moves into a future suffused with recognizable conflicts while tracking divergent yet resonant trajectories. Rather than the thematic proximity of Cautery, what we encounter in Kornberg’s work is a portrait of dissipating propinquity, as three siblings leave behind the suburban Buenos Aires of their youth and disperse across the other side of the Atlantic.
Read alongside each other, these dissimilar novels—which conjoin disparate chronologies and topographies—together pose key questions for the form. How far can speculative comparisons scale? What scaffolding must a novel supply to effectively sketch out connections? And where can narratives of displacement disclose emplacement within similar structures?
These works from Lijtmaer and Kornberg suggest that the novel’s distinctive capacity for revealing unexpected links can shed new light on how we consider and counter crises. And this ability applies to crises that are either already well within view, as in the sexism scorchingly portrayed in Cautery, or else slowly becoming visible, as with the vanishing political possibilities depicted by Berlin Atomized.
The unnamed protagonist in the first narrative of Cautery finds little professional fulfillment as she rotely performs tasks like “draft[ing] media plans to rationalise which ruinous buildings on Pallars street will be converted into design hubs with walls covered in cascades of ferns or into delivery logistics centers.” That supposed promise of Barcelona’s urban renewal parallels the potential she mistakenly senses in a new relationship as she heads farther into her 30s. Her partner is a rising star in local politics, but he is also someone who she expects can “save me from the errors I’ve made in my life.”
Yet the new trajectory that she envisions with him transforms into an ever-narrowing road to nowhere, with their breakup leaving her as adrift as she was before, but now more isolated than ever. Retracing the development of a relationship that entails her utter effacement, she recalls how she subsumed her life into his: a decision encouraged by the same envious friends who she later abandons as she withdraws farther into a romantic partnership that soon proves to be an endless exercise in one-sided compromise. What once held an allure—such as decorating an apartment together in which to host dinner parties and spend weekend mornings reading on a sun-soaked balcony—later becomes something to endure, as his friends, problems, and plans for their future soon occupy so much space that there is little room left for her.
Sometimes, Lijtmaer subjects this protagonist to gentle ridicule, including a darkly funny moment describing how she seeks solace in the “personal amniotic fluid” of the air fresheners in Zara stores. Yet the novel’s real target seems to be the shallow friendships that sustain beliefs in romance and provide little else in the way of emotional sustenance. The protagonist, however, understands such situations as punishment for errors from her past that are only ever alluded to in vague terms: “Blathering friends who whine about men are my life-long sentence. They’ll impose themselves on me, one after another, in an assembly line until I collapse, exhausted.” But she finally finds closure by plotting alone a profitable form of revenge: one that relies on both her ex-boyfriend’s obliviousness and the extreme demand of the Catalan capital’s competitive real-estate market. She cashes 75 security deposits by falsely leasing the apartment that was once theirs to multiple people while he is away for a weekend with his new partner.
The strength that she summons for such an act is regularly exemplified in the novel’s other narrative by the Englishwoman Deborah Moody, who recounts from beyond the grave a series of encounters with adversity in the 17th century. After being trapped by an early and unhappy marriage, she pursues new opportunities across the Atlantic. Like the historical figure on which she is based, Moody finds some success there, in spite of the strict limits imposed on women. She also searches for new forms of kinship, but even the most promising prospects—such as a collaboration with a midwife named Anne Hutchinson, who wants her help ushering a new faith-based and proto-feminist community into the world—are ultimately found lacking. The connection that she seeks instead comes in a brief epilogue that outlines an unexpected instance of metempsychosis: Cautery’s Moody is reincarnated in the novel’s second narrative as Senyora Pilar, who accompanies that other protagonist as her agreeable new landlady in Barcelona.
Cautery fittingly features all manner of searing comments, whether through indictments of pseudo-authentic wine bars and other bourgeois aspirations in mid-aughts Barcelona, or in its portrait of how Moody continues to face the same social constraints in colonial society even as she acquires economic power. In both narratives, disillusionment surfaces following relationships with men concerned solely with themselves, as well as in response to the deceptive possibilities posed by friendships with women: as when an old acquaintance invites the unnamed protagonist for a drink but only to see her at her worst, or when Hutchinson reveals that the words she used to stir Moody to action actually came from a male preacher uninterested in supporting the progressive community they had begun to assemble.
By constellating these concerns, Cautery suggests that, even as frustratingly little has changed across the centuries, it remains worth turning to those facing similar circumstances, no matter how remote they might seem. After all, the familiar discrimination that Deborah faces even from those hoping to establish a so-called “New World” echoes what Lijtmaer has elsewhere described as her own moment of feminist awakening: Being hushed by a man, who was tacitly supported by others, in a supposedly progressive space.
“Respectability,” Moody explains (in a distillation of attitudes that Lijtmaer assiduously works against), “is a tremendously comfortable cloak: it is invisible, but once you try it on you cannot live without its warmth, without its protective veil.” Such a critique is all the more powerful in that it comes not in Cautery’s contemporary narrative but rather in the narrative from centuries ago. No matter how it might get dressed up, the problem of playing by someone else’s rules remains. Yet by adopting a stereoscopic process of twinned narratives, the novel crucially demonstrates how alternatives might become apparent.
What scaffolding must a novel supply to effectively sketch out connections?
Kaleidoscopic but never chaotic, Berlin Atomized is loosely framed by actions occurring in Tokyo in 2063. Originally a set of stories, the novel begins by tracking the displacements of a doubled diaspora: a Jewish family that had moved to Buenos Aires in the 20th century finds a subsequent generation slowly splintering off in the first decades of the new millennium. In Nordelta, a prosperous community outside the Argentine capital, the three Goldstein children chart separate paths out of an oppressive adolescent ennui that seems inevitable if one stays within its gated borders.
Nina watches as Jeremías and Mateo look to the possibilities of a life abroad, rather than ever looking after her. Their shaky sibling bond reflects the lack of any real parental presence: their father is almost always away on business, and, in a sign of another relationship strained by absence, the children address their mother by her first name. Although the start of the 21st century in Argentina is marked by a financial crisis—one from which the Goldstein paterfamilias mysteriously benefited—the novel later turns to more personal crises as it advances into speculation about the late 2020s and 2030s, and as the siblings search for meaning in Berlin, Paris, and even the IDF. When she follows in her older brothers’ footsteps, Nina (who narrates most of the novel) understands that “leaving was my inexorable destiny,” and the novel delineates how difficult it is for all three to ever feel as if they have arrived.
As befits a young narrator—Nina begins recounting events as a teenager and never reaches middle age—and similarly young writer—Kornberg was 25 when Atomizado Berlín appeared in Argentina in 2021—there is a veritable verve to the novel (one encapsulated in an epigraph from “The Waste Land” that equates youth with a whirlpool). But the sometimes restless ranging across cultural references in the first sections—one two-page span, for instance, invokes pre-Raphaelite paintings, Daft Punk’s Discovery, TNT specials, Raymond Carver, and Rubén Darío—recedes once Nina finds herself adrift amid new contexts and conflicts.
The Europe where she and Jeremías ultimately settle is nothing like the one that they had always envisioned from afar. (Mateo, who went to Israel to serve in its army, dies on duty at age 21.) In Paris, Jeremías, a jazz musician predisposed to despondence, has his life upended by a series of attacks in 2027 that were launched by a vaguely leftist movement calling itself the New Resistance, which eventually carries out similar actions across the continent. Berlin, though, is largely spared. And it is there that Nina—who had held a series of random jobs in Argentina, since her privilege meant “Making it to the end of the month was more a sport than a necessity”—becomes a photographer and later an art-world star. That part of her career, however, is narrated retrospectively by her erstwhile partner Ossip, a German artist whom she had met in Buenos Aires and who comes to resent that his successes dissipate while hers accumulate.
After being enlisted by a friend from her Nordelta days to support the increasingly ineffective efforts of the New Resistance, Nina has a harrowing experience observing what political prisoners who were aligned with its mission must now endure. Grappling with the horrors of what she witnessed, she shares a reflection on her new medium: “There was a certain unspeakable quality to what I had seen that convinced me of the vital necessity to keep taking photographs, however inaccurate and asymptotic this attempt to reach the truth might be.”
Such attempts to render the ineffable indelible constitute a powerful ars poetica for the camera, and it is indeed what garners Nina acclaim from the art world. But Kornberg also reveals how a similar process—producing urgent and necessary approximations—can result from a novel staging radically different scales of connection.
In a section of Berlin Atomized narrated by Jeremías, he strikingly refers to a “convex similarity” when comparing the youth of Buenos Aires with that of the tony suburb of Vicente López. While his deployment of the phrase delimits how those groups are “the same, just with different idols,” the image also encapsulates how Kornberg’s novel works, as its different sections together bend outward and away from obvious parallels. Like Lijtmaer’s Cautery, in other words, it rejects any curving inward toward a narrow space of comparison that would presumably comprise a concave similarity.
Of course, this convexity also summons the figure of a lens for correcting vision. And as they portray a range of parallels, both novels do sharpen our perspective on the present even as they swerve away from it. That clarity might come from a feminism that frames the problems of distant protagonists as ongoing and embedded, but not inevitable, as in Lijtmaer’s; or it might come from a speculative approach to the crumbling of 20th–century ideals, while the 21st advances, as in Kornberg’s. As points of view shift and protagonists flee—whether from conflicts, constricting circumstances, or even each other—the two novels reveal how the form can bring such concerns clearly into focus. 
This article was commissioned by Bécquer Seguín.
