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In her new brief story, “The Ghosts of Wannsee,” the writer Lauren Groff captures the exact second when a friendship modifications eternally. “Wannsee” follows two buddies from highschool who reunite one afternoon after a few years aside; the encounter alters their understanding of one another in ways in which neither anticipated. Groff’s narrator remembers her outdated pal Leslie as a childhood crush—and he or she remembers his father, who abused him and belittled her. However Leslie, now the associate of a wildly profitable designer, just isn’t desirous to summon outdated ghosts from his previous. When the narrator meets up with him on a short layover in Berlin, she realizes that the particular person standing in entrance of her is now not her Leslie: “Oh, I assumed, how unusual to see folks whom you’ve beloved for therefore lengthy,” Groff writes. “You don’t actually see their present face; as an alternative, you see the faces of your best depth of affection.”
Groff’s most up-to-date novel, The Vaster Wilds, which the Atlantic contributor Judith Shulevitz likened to a “pilgrimage,” adopted a solitary younger lady operating by way of the wilderness on foot in Seventeenth-century America. The narrator in “Wannsee” takes a cab by way of up to date Berlin, surrounded by folks, museums, and bars. The 2 settings couldn’t be extra completely different, however Groff’s novel and her brief story share an curiosity within the revelations and limitations of a single viewpoint. In “Wannsee,” the narrator is caught off guard by Leslie’s anger at her makes an attempt at sympathy. Groff faucets into the deeply unsettling actuality that, it doesn’t matter what experiences we share, the reminiscences we now have are formed by our views, and are ours alone.
The Ghosts of Wannsee
By Lauren Groff
In Berlin, the winter sky is screwed on so tight that each one the world beneath turns into darkish and grey and grim. On my runs round Wannsee, from the nook of my eye, I might glimpse the livid ghosts of the place seething in the midst of the lake, reworking into whitecaps if I checked out them straight. Round some bends, I’d come throughout bare outdated males, vivid pink with the chilly of their swim, vigorously toweling off their withered loins. After I’d come to the ferry launch to Pfaueninsel, the peacocks throughout the spit of water would cry out so loudly of their winter rutting, I might simply think about that the island was completely fabricated from peacocks, in layers 4 thick upon the bottom, that the fortress there was wrapped in a hissing sheet of iridescent blue, the million eyes of Argos on their tail feathers staring up, affronted by the low grey clouds.
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