18 Jan 2011 01:50:03
This 30-year-old's debut novel, The History of History, published this month, arrives pre-garlanded with praise. The novelist Riva Galchen calls it "brilliantly disorienting"; according to Booklist, it's "stunning in its artistry, audacity and insight".
The History of History: A Novel of Berlin
by Ida Hattemer-Higgins
Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
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Set in Berlin early in the last decade, it charts a young American woman's descent into a surreal form of madness, whereby her life comes to overlap with that of a woman living through the Third Reich. Berlin takes on a hallucinatory quality as the past intrudes into the present and the nightmare of Nazism is made manifest. Extravagantly ambitious, wide-ranging in reference, and written with real flair, the book has already earned comparisons with Borges and WG Sebald.
Hattemer-Higgins, who grew up in Boston but has lived in a variety of locations over the last decade, including Tokyo, Mumbai and Stockholm, first got the idea for it while working as a tour guide at the concentration camp memorial of Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin. Forced to engage every day with the details of Germany's catastrophic history, she became preoccupied with the way in which – as she puts it on her website – "history is living. It's taking on new proportions in current life, both political and spiritual."
A formidable linguist, Hattemer-Higgins speaks six languages and is learning a seventh, Russian ("you can glide into new countries and take up living in them without too much friction"). On her site, she also reveals that she hates cooking ("I find it distracting") but loves eating, once took part in a chili-eating contest, and wrote The History of History while listening to just one piece of music – St Matthew Passion. She now divides her time between Berlin and Moscow.
The History of History: A Novel of Berlin
by Ida Hattemer-Higgins
Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
Search the Guardian bookshop
Set in Berlin early in the last decade, it charts a young American woman's descent into a surreal form of madness, whereby her life comes to overlap with that of a woman living through the Third Reich. Berlin takes on a hallucinatory quality as the past intrudes into the present and the nightmare of Nazism is made manifest. Extravagantly ambitious, wide-ranging in reference, and written with real flair, the book has already earned comparisons with Borges and WG Sebald.
Hattemer-Higgins, who grew up in Boston but has lived in a variety of locations over the last decade, including Tokyo, Mumbai and Stockholm, first got the idea for it while working as a tour guide at the concentration camp memorial of Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin. Forced to engage every day with the details of Germany's catastrophic history, she became preoccupied with the way in which – as she puts it on her website – "history is living. It's taking on new proportions in current life, both political and spiritual."
A formidable linguist, Hattemer-Higgins speaks six languages and is learning a seventh, Russian ("you can glide into new countries and take up living in them without too much friction"). On her site, she also reveals that she hates cooking ("I find it distracting") but loves eating, once took part in a chili-eating contest, and wrote The History of History while listening to just one piece of music – St Matthew Passion. She now divides her time between Berlin and Moscow.
