Out for the Count
A Kiwi researches a wartime German aristocrat while battling her demons.
The first thing that hits you about I Laugh Me Broken, by Bridget van der Zijpp, is the cover, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Each features a lush European painting with hot-pink typography. And at the centre of both novels are seemingly listless women. That is where the similarities end. Although Relaxation is a pitch-dark satire of contemporary unease set in New York, I Laugh Me Broken is a moody, airless novel set in Berlin over 2019-20 as reports of a “new flu thing in China” begin to emerge.
With her school-level German, 36-yearold Ginny leaves New Zealand and her taciturn boyfriend, Jay, behind for Berlin to embark on a research project for a book she wants to write about aristocrat Felix von Luckner, a maverick buccaneer from World War I.
Ginny is fascinated by a 1917 incident in which, as a prisoner of war on Motuihe Island after his steel-hulled sailing ship the Seeadler was shipwrecked, Count Luckner faked setting up a play for Christmas and requested props that were later used in his escape attempt.
She feels a kind of fraudulence in referring to herself as a writer, based on what she alludes to as a thin record of achievement, and is vague when anyone asks her about her project. She is also haunted by the suicide of her mother, who died when Ginny was young, but she receives new information from a cousin that sheds light on what could have been behind her mother’s motivations. Ginny has a 50% chance of carrying the inherited gene for Huntington’s disease and is reluctant to take the test to find out.
If you found out your life was going to be foreshortened, would you live any differently?
If she doesn’t get the desired test result, she knows she will be unable to go back to just not knowing. I Laugh Me Broken asks the question, if you found out your life was going to be foreshortened, would you live any differently?
In this third novel, van der Zijpp is excellent at creating atmosphere, building
vivid scenes and character detail. The kitchen in Ginny’s Berlin flat smells of burnt dust, stored potatoes “and a general lack of attention to detail”.
She encounters characters such as film conservator Christoph, whom Ginny observes as being so large that he must create a change in the atmosphere wherever he goes. She seems self-absorbed, but she’s acutely aware of it, and it likely stems from the anxiety she has of being a burden on others if she ends up with Huntington’s.
Despite this, she is a keen observer of the people around her, especially her turbo-flirt costume-designer stepsister Mel, who is the opposite of conservative Ginny. Constantly searching for clues and understanding, Ginny not only can’t face her future, but also can’t reckon with her relationship back home or even her book project.
Despite trying multiple ways into writing her book, the appeal of the Count, with his exaggerated half-truths, bluster and contrivances, diminishes and she moves away from her research and begins to look inward, taking on an unsteady, incautious edge. Her research into the Count gives way to investigating Huntington’s and her stitched-together family dynamics.
Van der Zijpp has a frustrating tendency to rely on laboured and often contrived conversations between characters, which extend across pages. And the fact that this is largely an enjoyable and atmospheric read, and a fairly interesting look at fate and freedom, only made me feel more dismayed at what turned out to be a soft landing, with a copout final line. l
I LAUGH ME BROKEN, by Bridget van der Zijpp (VUP, $30)