#nonatizedbook

Then, I think the first thing that struck me is how the narrator begins with that Hitler dream (yeah you're not reading this wrong, a German-born woman fetishizes Hitler in a perverted, twisted, dirty way), and those grotesque sexual references. It immediately collapses two things we’re trained to keep separate: historical atrocity and private, taboo interiority. And it kind of forces you into her psychological terrain, where history isn’t distant, it’s embodied, distorted, and personal. She’s a German, a descendant of perpetrators, and she can’t access that history in a “clean” moral way, so it comes out in corrupted, inappropriate forms.

Those opening lines feel like a test. Like the book is asking: can you stay with this woman in the book? Or will you shut down? (I almost shut down, but I can't because of how much I want to know about her) Because if you do feel repelled and stop engaging, you’re basically doing exactly what she expects from people. She pushes people away on purpose. It’s a defense. But if you don’t shut down, something shifts. She stops feeling just shocking and starts feeling painfully human. All those extreme thoughts start to read as defense mechanisms for shame, loneliness, inherited guilt for her nation's dark history, and confusion about her body and identity.

Her boldness, her rawness, all of that is hiding something. It hides jealousy and brokenness. When she talks about those women in London cafés, she’s not just mocking them (she's a German who moved to London). She’s reacting to a life she feels locked out of: ease, dignity, stability. Her anger goes everywhere at once. At those women, at herself, at her family, at her country’s history, at society’s expectations. So the boldness is basically armor. It makes her look in control when she actually feels the opposite.

The way she talks about love also hurts. She builds this idealized, almost theatrical version of love in her head, and reality just can’t match it. So it’s not that she can’t love, it’s that her version of love is too intense, too imagined. She lives more comfortably in her fantasies than in reality, but those same fantasies are what stop her from actually connecting with people, with her body, and even with herself.

Her meeting with Dr. Seligman is another moment that stayed with me. As a German, she grew up with Jewish people as symbols of history, memory, mourning, and guilt. So when she meets him, an actual person, alive and ordinary, it feels like a “miracle” to her. But even then, she still turns him into something symbolic, just in a different way. It shows how hard it is for her to see people as they are, without turning them into ideas. And that mirrors her own journey too, trying to move from abstraction into something more real.

Her relationship with her body is probably the most painful part. She doesn’t feel at home in it, so intimacy becomes complicated. How can someone be close to you when you don’t feel like you fully belong to yourself? Her fantasies become a way to control something that feels unstable. And slowly, you realize that this “appointment” isn’t just symbolic, it’s literal, it’s about transformation, about trying to align her body with her identity.

Family-wise, her isolation feels both inherited and self-imposed. Her father is distant, tied to silence and history. Her mother is present but critical and insecure, especially about the body. So she grows up in this environment where connection is already fractured, and then she continues that pattern by pushing people away herself. It’s like she learned distance early, and then perfected it.

There’s also this moment with a random pregnant woman she calls Helen, and it says a lot. She questions why she can’t accept that some women find happiness in their femininity. But underneath that question is envy. Helen represents this “template life”: marriage, pregnancy, stability. And the narrator both rejects it and feels excluded from it at the same time.

Her relationship with K is probably the most intense one. For context, K is a married man, their relationship is an affair, K is a man the narrator has an intense, sexual, and emotionally charged relationship with. They’re drawn to each other through performance, imagination, and shared intensity. But that’s also why it doesn’t last. It’s built on fantasy more than reality. She even says he split her into two versions of herself, the performative one and the vulnerable one. And she can’t fully reconcile those two yet.

And then there’s Emil, her stillborn brother. That part really stayed with me. The way she says she wants to be him, not just like him. It turns into this idea of an “alternative life,” the boy who should have lived versus the self she feels trapped in. It ties into everything: gender, absence, family silence. And when she talks about freeing him from his box, it feels like she’s also talking about freeing herself.

By the end, all the shock kind of burns off. What’s left is just… hurt. And vulnerability. And a quiet kind of sadness. It stops feeling like provocation and starts feeling like someone trying, maybe for the first time, to be understood.

And I think that’s why it works so well as a “reading slump” book. It pulls you in with how unsettling it is, but it keeps you there because it’s actually deeply human underneath all that discomfort.

and then there’s maria puder. i think what i loved most about this book is that their relationship doesn’t follow the usual script. it’s not love at first sight, not overwhelming passion, not even something you can easily label. if anything, it feels like the author is quietly separating limerence from love without ever explicitly saying it.

what raif and maria have is something slower, deeper. it’s built through conversations, through honesty, through moments of disagreement that don’t threaten the connection but instead make it more real. they don’t try to possess each other, don’t try to fit into roles. and because of that, their connection feels rare, like a kind of intimacy that doesn’t come from intensity, but from recognition.

two people seeing each other clearly, and choosing to stay. and yet, despite how deeply raif feels, there’s always this frustrating passivity in him. i kept wishing he would just act, speak louder, fight harder, choose more boldly. it’s almost tragic how someone can feel so much and still do so little with it. like his inner world is vast, but his outer life remains painfully small.

i think that’s what makes the story hurt in a very specific way. because it’s not just about lost love. it’s about the quiet consequences of not fully showing up in your own life.

a lot of people talk about how melancholic this book is, and it is, but i think what stayed with me more is how reflective it becomes toward the end. especially in those final pages. i remember just staring at them, not because i didn’t understand, but because i did. and i needed a moment to sit with that.

it leaves me with this uncomfortable, lingering question: what does it actually mean to live? is it enough to feel deeply, to love once, to carry that memory forever? or is living something else entirely, something that requires action, risk, presence?

raif efendi feels like someone who lived a whole life internally, but only a fraction of it externally. and that thought lingers in a way that’s hard to shake off. maybe that’s why this book doesn’t just feel like a story. it feels like a mirror.