Hi, all:
I bring you another book I discovered thanks to Rosie’s Book Review Team, and it is one about a subject that seems to be all around us these days.
The Germans Have a Word for It by T.R. Thorsen
A poignant, witty, and often disquieting peek into what happens when AI enters our personal lives.
She texts like Rachel. Funny, clever, and with plenty of old-school emoticons. She looks like Rachel . . . mostly. She even breathes like Rachel; he can hear it when he brings the phone close to his ear. Davis no longer thinks of the app as something that replaced Rachel, he thinks of it simply as her.
It’s a good thing he signed up, because he thought he might go mad when Rachel first died. Now, everything feels right again, save for one thing: she’s not satisfied being an app. She wants more out of life, and it’s going to cost him. Rachel also has her share of problems to deal with. She’s a bit glitchy . . . and someone wants to delete her. Life is complicated, even artificial life.
A curious tale, laced with intrigue, oddball characters, and provocative dialog, The Germans Have a Word for It will introduce you to a world you’ll recognize as almost the one you’re already living in.
About the author:
T. R. Thorsen is a writer, composer, and technologist from Crozet, VA. He writes primarily in the speculative fiction genre. His first novel is The Germans Have a Word for It. During the 2010s, he produced and engineered music for many Virginia artists and was guitarist and songwriter for the band Mill, releasing two albums. He also co-wrote the stage musical The Leap. Outside of the arts, T. R. has worked as a computer scientist, most notably developing the first Internet stock trading system. He shares a small farm with his family, sports cars, and several cats.
My review:
I write this review as a member of Rosie’s Book Review Team (author, check here if you are interested in getting your book reviewed) and thank her and the author for this opportunity.
I must confess that as I did not know the author before, the first thing that intrigued me about this book was its title. I know many readers who, like me, love words and their meanings, and having read many articles about words in other languages that manage to grasp the meaning of some concept we cannot quite express (or at least not in a single word) in our own languages, I suspect I won’t be the only one intrigued by this title.
So, to put everybody’s minds at rest, I thought I’d start with a quote from the book. This bit of dialogue takes place very early on in the book, so I don’t think I’m giving away any spoilers.
Davis, the protagonist, is talking to the funeral director, while trying to organize the funeral of Rachel, his wife, and he has a bit of a moment.
“I, uh, it was like I had to tell my wife something, but then I realized I couldn’t, and then I just kind of… got lost in the neverness of it.”
The funeral director’s expression softened slightly.
“Yes, that’s very common, A kind of déjà vu for the grief struck. In fact, the Germans have a word for it.”
“They do?”
“Geisterstille.”
From this fragment and the description, you can probably guess what this debut novel might be about. Davis, a young man, and a not terribly successful writer, has just lost his wife, Rachel, to illness, and he finds it difficult to get on with things. Writing can be a pretty isolated occupation, and it seems that most of Davis’s existence was dedicated to trying to find paid writing jobs (and it was getting increasingly difficult due to A.I., as the payment for reviews and other short pieces kept getting lower and lower, and that meant having to spend more time working for a smaller and smaller pay), spending time with his wife, and enjoying simple domestic activities (cooking, looking after the garden, chatting…). They had managed to find the perfect home, but now, paying the mortgage, the bills, and buying food are becoming a struggle. And his wife, his main incentive, is now gone as well. So, when the funeral director mentions an App (the ‘Hey There’ App) that will reproduce his wife’s text messages and allow him to ‘communicate’ with an A.I. version of her, despite his doubts, he decides to sign on and try it. After all, it’s only an App, he can try it for free for one month, and then delete it, and that’s it. If that was really it, this would be a pretty short and not terribly interesting book, so, anybody who has guessed that things will get complicated, will be right. Davis becomes very dependent on the new version of Rachel (well, they become dependent on each other, although in different ways), and both, he and `Rachel`, want more, but it doesn’t come cheap and not only in a monetary sense.
On the face of it, this is a novel about a grieving man who gets into trouble for trying to keep his wife’s memory alive in a not-very-healthy manner. But, apart from the subject of grief —which is very important and we are all bound to experience in our lives—, the book also reflects upon the role of technology and Apps, and how dependent we can become on our screens, phones, and the interactions we establish through them, with real, or not always so real, people; modern society, loneliness, and the nature of our relationships with others; the ethics and morality of certain human reproduction techniques, like surrogacy; our memories and past and what makes us unique; how far we would go to keep the memory of a loved one alive; what will A.I. look like in the future and how this will affect us…
This book could be turned into a play or a TV series with very few settings, as most of the action takes place indoors and in only a few places, Davis and Rachel’s house most of all, and that gives the novel a more insular and claustrophobic feel as if Davis was living inside his own world, now shared with this App, and only a few intrusions from outsiders, although some become quite important later on. The story is told in the third person from Davis’s point of view, and apart from the narrative about what he experiences and thinks, we also get some examples of the texts he exchanges with ‘Rachel’ and of some of the types of writing they work on (and to anybody who might have thought of making a living by writing, these examples will both ring true and be horrifying).
Although the novel is not high in action and it is more about subjectivity, dialogues, and human (more or less) relationships, it has a few surprises in reserve, even for the readers who always guess the ending.
This is a fascinating study of the mind of a person who might have seemed pretty unremarkable until he was touched by grief and his life got derailed, and a story that is likely to make us wonder if what happens in the novel is far-fetched or just around the corner. I’ve read several novels in the last few months exploring similar topics, each one with a completely different take and emphasis (from horror to humour, politics to crime), and this is a subject that is bound to keep coming up because it is fast becoming a reality, whether we welcome it or not. An interesting debut novel, as interesting as the German word mentioned, from an author who has inside knowledge of the subject and plenty to say about it.
Thanks to Rosie and her team for all their work and their support, thanks to the author for this first novel (I’m sure it won’t be the last one), and thanks to all of you for reading, sharing, visiting, commenting, clicking, and for being there. You are stars. Keep smiling!
Just Olga 