Nadja on Nadja on Nadja

Who dares take a magnifying glass and hold it close enough to examine the cesspool of the human soul? What slime and muck will be revealed? What horrors, night sweats, humiliations, and disappointments? Maybe that’s why human beings have skin, swift feet, and a healthy propensity for repression? We don’t want to see or hear, contemplate or feel the ugly reality of our existence (or at least Americans don’t want to). That’s why the novelist/translator Tsipi Keller, born in Prague, raised in Tel Aviv, educated in Paris, and living in the US, is one of the few writers in English to take a deep dive into personhood, in this case womanhood, and bring to light some unpleasant realities that many of us would prefer to leave far below the surface.

Who doesn’t have a healthy sense of schadenfreude? Why not create a rendering of the tunnel of pain that any living human being must pass through, to get to what? Another tunnel of pain? And Nadja, the protagonist of Nadja on Nadja, a writer and recently fired functionary, painfully and poignantly exists in such a world. We see what neuroses she hides behind and what games she plays with herself and others to protect herself when the hurt gets too real.

Luckily, she’s also hard at work on a novel she alternately refers to as Woman or Woman on Woman or Woman Ending Badly, all of which could easily be the title of Keller’s novel too.

“As much as she hates the office and feels she is being exploited, at the very least she manages to exploit them back by appropriating precious time to do her own work,” Nadja reasons from the company bathroom where she goes to hide from the toxic work environment. Although this kind of rationalization might be a successful coping strategy for those who find themselves having to work “a day job,” it leads to Nadja’s termination and sets her off, “like a brand new robot” untethered to the nine-to-five.

Idle time of course leaves more time for introspection, and Nadja introspects to the nth degree. She sees the world scales tipped towards propagating male domination, yet to her, the real interesting actors are the oppressed women — funny, sad, cruel, anxious, lonely, irritable, human beings: “when women begin to write the truth about their lives, the world will split open.” Her friend, Sabine, attributes this quote to Virginia Woolf but Nadja corrects her; it’s from Muriel Rukeyser. Surely, Nadja finds validation in these words.

Disassociation is another tool in Nadja’s toolbox for survival, as while walking along the street, she reveals that “she has not been able to match the inside with the outside; something has gone missing.” With a healthy dose of self-hatred, she goes on to theorize that

She is living proof that some women, women like her, are maladjusted, allowing their inflated egos to dictate their actions, instead of quietly acquiescing and getting on with the program, conforming to the natural order.

The natural order is that men thrive and women like Nadja identify with “the chickens, impaled on skewers, dripping fat and juices in the supermarket display-window.” The two men in Nadja’s life: Jerry, her odious boss who she describes as “in his fifties and, like most short men, walks like a peacock,” and Raoul, her sometimes sympathetic married lover, are never going to fulfill her. She doesn’t seem to expect them to, although her relationships with both leave her with a sense of disappointment when neither comes through for her.

When she and Raoul go out, she imagines that she suddenly has a heart attack and wonders whether Raoul will call for help or will he quietly sneak out? “What spoils the illusion for her is the knowledge that she and Raoul are fakes: they are not a couple, and Raoul charges the meals [they have together] to his expense account.” Nadja’s more meaningful relationships...