What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession – not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton’s formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication.
‘Polly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer? is a beautiful piece of writing. An expansive, ambitious, witty stream of consciousness, this is a novel of, and about, translation – not just linguistic translation, but the acts of self-translation we are called upon to perform constantly in the modern world; translating our experience via the disparate languages of personal history, intimacy and class. This a novel that confronts formally the fractals of the self, in a voice that feels confident and yet insecure, cerebral and yet vulnerable. I loved it.’
— Susannah Dickey, author of Common Decency
‘I’m nuts about this book – a romantic comedy in the most wildly open and profoundly honest sense, a tour-de-force of the telling detail, an electrifying contemplation of our capacity for risk.’
— Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Deep House
‘What Am I, A Deer? is profound, funny and true. With biting precision, Polly Barton marries the mundane with the transcendent, asking whether we can ever truly escape ourselves and the societal structures around us. Her prose is incisive, moving and beautiful – I loved it.’
— Jessica Andrews, author of Milk Teeth
‘In this sparkling novel of ideas, Polly Barton illuminates the shame of loving what other people love. How embarrassing to find your feelings perfectly summed up in a cliché, to sing a pop song and mean every word! In Barton’s hands, the cringeworthy passions become tools of self-knowledge and keys to a philosophy of the glorious banal. Gaming, karaoke, drunkenness, romance – there is nothing more revealing than the everyday escape.’
— Sofia Samatar, author of Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life
‘A tender and nuanced novel exploring love, obsession, alienation, work and language with an immense sense of interiority. Polly Barton is capable of capturing fleeting, seemingly unremarkable feelings with perfect precision that cuts through to the reader’s very core – it made me stop and gasp several times as I recalled feeling exactly this way. It speaks to how we yearn to connect but often fail to truly see each other, and to the fundamental, gargantuan power of a crush. Karaoke will never be the same again!’
— Anastasiia Fedorova, author of Second Skin
‘The protagonist of What Am I, A Deer? finds herself both Schrödinger and his cat on entering the Frankfurt tram, the office, and the ‘black box’ of the karaoke booth; inside and outside simultaneously, trying to figure out whether she exists and in a state of tingling oscillation. Polly Barton is the maestra of controlled dissolution.’
— Jen Calleja, author of Fair: The Life-Art of Translation
Hand signed and numbered edition or 2500.
