Appearance Versus Reality

The theme of appearance versus reality runs throughout the novel, but it is in Berlin—where Anna and Tom have built their adult lives—that this tension is most fully developed. From the start, the gap between how their lives look and how they feel is foregrounded. The novel opens with a description of their apartment as it appears in photographs: clean, minimal, stylish, full of soft light and carefully chosen objects. This aesthetic is a form of self-branding, a way of projecting a certain lifestyle to others and perhaps to themselves. But in the second chapter, this polished surface is dismantled. The reality of the apartment is dust, clutter, mismatched mugs, and stains on the floor—the ordinary chaos of daily life. The camera's selective framing is shown to be a kind of fiction, exposing the novel’s central concern with the dissonance...