What Am I, a Deer?
Polly Barton’s insightful stream-of-consciousness novel What Am I, a Deer? is about a translator’s search for meaningful connection.
An unnamed Japanese translator works at a computer game corporation in Frankfurt. Eccentric in her adolescence and considered different by her peers, she is pleased to have achieved an outward semblance of adulthood. She also delights in carefree karaoke nights and experiences self-doubt, though.
In musing, often paragraph-long sentences, the woman’s past is shared: She studied philosophy and lived in London and Japan, all while yearning to reinvent herself. She understands others in singular terms; her boyfriend is known only as a “stylish man.” She has little interest in gaming, and her observations of her colleagues are humorous. References to lyrics and karaoke flesh out her perspective, as when she compares her new life in Germany to “the song that you had chosen that turns out to be in a key that you can’t wrap your voice round.”
But then a man on a commuter tram hands her an umbrella that she almost forgot, and she develops a crush on him from afar. It persists for a year, during which she orchestrates irrational reasons to follow him.
Its prose tidal and prone to extending the briefest encounters into meditations full of associative logic, the novel is a brilliant, sustained monologue. Indeed, by laying bare a primal, feminine solitude—crafted by the narrator’s selective interiority, buoyed by obsession, and further exacerbated by her work-abroad circumstances—the woman becomes an integral conduit for wider fissures between hoped-for escapist fantasies and a lonelier reality in which communication is fraught but worth braving.
A woman’s candid thoughts percolate in the striking, artful novel What Am I, a Deer?, about trying to fit in, love, and become self-aware.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
