Gilgi

 

Gilgi / Irmgard Keun
trans. from the German by Geoff Wilkes
NY: Melville House, 2013, c1931.
240 p.

Imagine my delight when I saw this lovely Neversink edition of Gilgi at a secondhand bookstore recently. I've been looking for more Keun, after reading her Artificial Silk Girl quite a few years ago. I was pleased to now be able to read her first novel. 

I found this story full of hectic energy and a strong female voice, like her other novels. This story is a little scattered, perhaps because it's her first, but it is still snappy and fresh and full of sharp social commentary. Gilgi knows what she wants, she has her eye on a business career, teaching herself typing and languages and dressing the part of an efficient secretary. She's young, energetic and ambitious. 

But, like many other young women, she gets completely sidetracked when she meets a man. He's a friend of her friend and somehow she becomes infatuated so thoroughly that she puts aside her timetable and ambition to focus on him. She leaves her parents' house to move in with him, after they've told her she's adopted - even her quest to discover her birth mother feels anticlimatic after she switches her energy to focus on her new man. 

But even within this absorbing relationship, there are prickles from the outside that disturb her. She comes across an old acquaintance who is selling vacuums door to door; she visits his wife, another old friend, only to discover they are nearly destitute, with 3 children and another on the way, and about to be evicted. She rushes around for a lengthy part of the second half of the book, trying to find some money for them; it's a nightmarish, frantic scene. And then she finds that she is also facing a momentous decision -- and makes what I felt was the right one, striking out on her own once more. 

This story is powerful and feels so contemporary. Gilgi is living in Germany post WWI, and rising fascism is all around her, for those who cared to look. She faces misogyny when she goes to see a doctor, and there is a great speech she gives about the right of a woman to make her own decisions. She flits around nightclubs, around offices, around town, and gives a vision of class and privilege that can differ wildly within very close quarters. As always, Keun doesn't pull any punches in her realism, and the result is a wonderful, illuminating read.