This dispersal of identities is what gives the book its strength. In thematizing the readerly experience as a city anyone can enter, García creates a space for the reader to inject her own history into the book’s various narratives, and she makes this possible by offering stories from World War II to the contemporary era, successfully depicting the condition of living in the city of Berlin as time passes by ... The self-awareness that García gives her characters allows the text as a whole to function somehow autonomously. Without an identified narrator, the text appears expansively and virtuously unauthored — the product of a cast of characters that shape and define the social topography of the city, recoded as narrative ... Overall, Here in Berlin is an impeccable linguistic exercise in narratology and a brilliant exploration of the various identities we adhere to in metropolitan environments. García successfully rehumanizes a German postwar trauma of a populace that for so long coped with the making anonymous of people through genocide, the deadening speed of its capitalist structures, and the oppressive world of East Berlin.

Here in Berlin is less a novel than an exhilarating orchestration of competing voices and temporalities ... Here in Berlin is a marvelous palimpsest. Voices refract back on one another, each moment containing other, earlier moments within it ... From the wrestling with German memory to the strangely passive narrator, there’s an obvious literary ghost haunting Here in Berlin as well: W.G. Sebald. García happily admits the influence in her acknowledgments, and, in a tip of the cap, makes the Sebaldian decision to intersperse her text with ghostly photographs. But García’s prose is less melancholic than Sebald’s, her stance more optimistic.

Together their tales form a jarring and haunting choral work of remembrance and pragmatism, pride and regret ... Garcia, a transcendentally imaginative, piquantly satiric, and profoundly compassionate novelist, dramatizes the helter-skelter of lives ruptured by tyranny, war, and political upheavals with sharp awareness of unlikely multicultural alliances ... With echoes of W. G. Sebald and Günter Grass, Garcia has created an intricate, sensitive, and provocative montage revolving around the question: 'Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?'

But it strikes me that Cristina García’s Here in Berlin is one of the most interesting new works of fiction I’ve read ... It’s billed as a novel, but there are few (if any) novels that take a similar form. In 35 separate monologues, plus five italicized sections describing the unnamed Visitor who elicits these interview statements, García presents a portrait of the city that is at once true and imaginary ... The voices are remarkably distinct, and even their linguistic mannerisms — with interpolations of bits of German, multiple ways of rendering or evading the facts and direct addresses to someone...yet this more ambitious novel, in which she transcends her own life story to tread delicately on the turf staked out by Christa Wolf and W. G. Sebald... This novel, in any case, bears none of the obvious trappings of commercial success. It is not suspense-filled. It is not heartwarming. It is simply very, very good.

It’s an old but effective technique: the use of oral histories—interviews with witnesses to past events—to paint a picture of an era through multiple perspectives. Cristina García employs this technique to great effect in Here in Berlin, a quilt of a novel that creates a hypnotic portrait of the former East German city during and after World War II ... If some of the histories are sketchy, most provide a powerful evocation of the continuing effect of the Nazi era on Berlin’s inhabitants. As the Visitor states at the end of the novel, there is 'poetry in the listening.' And that’s what Here in Berlin is: a poetic pastiche of rationalizations and regrets, and a testament to the challenge of reconciling a difficult past.

...while the mood veers from one perspective to another, the collection is united in its haunting and elegiac tone ... García treats each story with compassion and respects that every recounted story is a cocktail of unreliable memory, deliberate lies, and half-remembered truths ... As much as Here in Berlin is an exploration of the micro stories which form the majority of its text, it is also an examination of solitude as deliberately pursued by The Visitor ... The stories that comprise Here in Berlin are beautifully related with a perfectly pitched sense of melancholy and pathos, bound into a delicate yet powerful whole by The Visitor’s own struggles to preserve and renew her sense of self while forming a new perspective to live by.

In short vignettes, characters speak directly to the reader, telling their most intimate secrets, their long-held disappointments, and sometimes their fondest memories. As a result, the city in Here in Berlin is revealed in short glimpses and passionate bursts. It is up to the reader to assemble a sense of the whole, and each reader will come away with a different meaning … García wisely leaves all judgment of her characters to the reader. The Visitor offers no judgment on the page but continues across the city, conducting her interviews, until at last she, too, is overcome by the weight of history … Here in Berlin is a bold, innovative novel.

Garcia is a skilled writer, crafting a complete story from the threads of many glimpses. In the assembly of these glimpses, she has created a vivid portrait of a decimated yet surging Berlin since World War II, of individuality and humankind, of terror and resilience. It is beautifully written in a fluent and evocative prose. It is the story of how people live with their pasts. A stunning collection of memories, snippets, and specters.

With the vividness—and unreliability—of a fevered hallucination, they tell haunting, and occasionally intersecting, stories that last only a few pages but linger much longer ... Garcia evokes a multicultural Berlin, shaped by those who arrived in East Berlin from Cuba, Angola, and Russia. The novel’s many excellent characters and their stories combine to create a sense of a city where, as an amnesiac photojournalist puts it, the ghosts 'aren’t confined to cemeteries.'”