I Make Envy on Your Disco
Nothing translates for Sam Singer in Berlin: not the signs, not the city, not what he cannot say to the man waiting in New York.
Novel · 296 pages · 2024 – University of Nebraska Press
Nothing translates
I Make Envy on Your Disco, Eric Schnall’s novel, opens with Sam Singer in Berlin, pressing the wrong buttons and reading the wrong signs. The elevator, train doors, hotel codes, street names and German phrases keep him late to the moment he has entered.
He is thirty-seven, an art adviser from New York, in the city for Klaus Beckmann’s exhibition on Ostalgie, the longing for vanished East German objects and rituals.
The work is real. The reason is thin. Sam has crossed the Atlantic with a broken BlackBerry, Daniel’s green snowflake hat, and a strained relationship. Schnall uses delay as more than comic displacement. Meaning arrives before Sam can parse it. A German note waits to be carried across the hotel. A coffee invitation needs translation. A message on Daniel’s phone sends him across the ocean before he admits what it’s done.
Schnall uses that delay as more than comic displacement. Sam receives meaning after it has already acted on him. A German note has to be carried across the hotel. A coffee invitation has to be translated. A message on Daniel’s phone sends him across the ocean before he can admit what the message has done. The novel’s formal pressure lies there: Sam can keep postponing meaning, but he cannot stop meaning from arriving. Schnall turns delay into conduct.
Sam does not confront Daniel. He calls, jokes, deflects, asks about the dog, changes the subject. Adoption papers wait in New York. A child he wants remains unspoken. Berlin does not give Sam distance from Daniel. It turns Daniel into a presence that keeps returning: through a hat, a phone call, a missed confession, a body Sam cannot betray without carrying the betrayal back into the room.
The opening chapters keep this pressure comic. Sam misreads the hotel, fails at simple errands, eats alone in his room and turns each minor failure into a joke. The comedy works since it comes from helplessness rather than charm. He is funny, but rarely free. His wit buys time. It does not give him authority.
The hotel manager, Magda, first appears as another Berlin system refusing to cooperate: exact, brisk, faintly amused by Sam’s dependence. He turns her into a type before he knows her. The correction comes slowly. Behind the desk are tissues, meditation and private distress. She is not there to service Sam’s crisis. She has her own. The novel widens when the role gives way to the person. She resists being read at Sam’s pace. With her, delay does not protect him. It exposes him.
Substitution and failed relief
Klaus Beckmann’s exhibition gives the public form of the private problem. Immediate/Present gathers objects from a lost East German life. Klaus rejects the easy label of nostalgia, yet the objects still carry the ache of use after use has passed. Sam has spent years valuing, framing and selling objects. Berlin asks what remains when objects cannot be reduced to assets.
Daniel’s green snowflake hat answers that question more quietly than the exhibition does. It is packed without discussion, worn in Berlin, mistaken by Kaspar, fixed in photographs and pulled back into memory. The half-tablet of ecstasy and the acorn Sam pockets at the end follow its rule. Small things keep what speech delays.
Jeremy, the nephew of a client, who moves easily through the city, changes the book’s tempo. Until he arrives, Sam mostly watches Berlin from the side: irritated, stimulated, excluded, half-amused by his own failure. Jeremy puts him into motion with someone else. He knows where to eat, where to walk, what to call things and how to turn the city into usable space. He is no solution. Through him, Sam’s old equation breaks: movement once looked like freedom. It may have been another form of loneliness.
Kaspar sharpens that question through desire. What would another life look like if Daniel still occupied the room? The encounter remains partial: touch, dance, sleep, farewell, a divided photograph. Daniel is absent from the room, yet still controls what can happen there. Kaspar does not free Sam from Daniel. He shows Sam how much of Daniel survives in every possible alternative.
Elsewhere, he recalls a stalled train in Manhattan. An advertisement asks whether he is happy. He gets up, goes to his meeting and sells six paintings. The memory alters the Berlin scenes. His drifting was never just travel. His body had registered what his speech kept delaying. The text message, the collapse and the adoption papers strip away the idea that his sadness is only temperament.
Repetition is part of the novel’s design. The problem comes when movement stops testing Sam and starts marking time. Some middle passages of walking, eating and watching keep him in Berlin, but do not always move the reader deeper into his deferral. The jokes can have the same effect: they arrive quickly, sometimes before embarrassment, desire or dread has had time to settle. Schnall recovers whenever the scene forces exchange rather than observation: Magda at the desk, Jeremy on the walk, Kaspar in the apartment, Daniel on the phone.
The title phrase lands since it is broken and exact. I make envy on your disco comes from Jeremy’s past and returns to Sam’s present. It names the position he occupies all week: beside other people’s certainty, looking at joy as if it belongs elsewhere. He envies a night, a youth, a city, a body, a relationship, a version of himself he may never have possessed as cleanly as he remembers it.
By the end, Sam has made contact without mastering anything. Berlin offers no clean translation. It leaves him with objects, encounters and less room for pretending.
★★★★☆
Editorial