Publishers Weekly
★ 07/27/2020
Volckmer’s coruscating debut takes the form of a Bernhardian monologue made during a medical exam. While the title is a nod to the novel’s setting, its alternate title (The Story of a Jewish Cock) engenders the salacious tone. Sarah, the German-born, London-based 30-something narrator, opens the book by relating her sexual fantasies of Hitler to Dr. Seligman, her Jewish gynecologist. As Seligman examines Sarah, she provides a chaise lounges-like Freudian confessional, a setup that allows Volckmer to display her mastery of dark comedy. Sarah ponders epithets for the Fuhrer’s penis and explains how loving “a Jew... a proper one, with curls and a skullcap” is the only way for a German to overcome Holocaust guilt. The narrative is deepened when Sarah explores how the shame of being German has impacted her psyche: she describes a romance begun in a public toilet and her disdain for her familial and national roots, even airing out her frustration of being stereotyped as a German well versed in “Max fucking Sebald.” The book ends in a passage of contemplative beauty that grounds Sarah as a human trying to solve her own complications. The narration successfully walks a tightrope of incendiary subject matter via German-Jewish humor and literary touchstones; Volckmer’s inversion of Portnoy’s Complaint is a revelation. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"In a furious comic monologue to her gynecologist, the German-born narrator of this debut novel riffs on national shame, family secrets, sex and more with a disregard for propriety worthy of Alexander Portnoy." —New York Times Book Review
"Katharina Volckmer is a risk-taker of the first degree. Her monologue is of hypnotic, lyrical invention and wit, coruscating self-loathing, profound pessimism and fragile hope. As dark and brilliant as Naked Lunch. The Appointment is also mesmerisingly beautiful." —Ian McEwan, author of Atonement
"Set over the course of one long doctor’s visit, The Appointment is a rant-as-novel, a long-winded list of grievances, questions, and observations, starting with its protagonist's admission that she sometimes has a lot of pity for Hitler, and occasionally thinks about screwing him. It only gets wilder — and more thought-provoking — from there." —Vulture
"[Veering] from the sexual to the shocking to the mundane in the space of paragraphs...The Appointment [is]...a darkly funny untangling of national and sexual identity." —The Guardian
"Reminiscent of a Bernhardian monologue, one half of the conversation between a German patient living in London and her Jewish doctor....Deftly subtle....At once sexy, hilarious, and subversive, the book is also acutely sad. Desire, in this novel, takes many forms: the desire to be heard, the desire to be otherwise, the desire for a different past and a different future." —The Paris Review
“Surprising, inventive, disturbing and beautiful. I inhaled all its meanness and rancor at the beginning, which felt like a breath of fresh air. Even though I knew it would eventually turn, I was surprised and moved when it did. The Appointment is an overdue, radical intervention." —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
"A bitterly comic unburdening of a conscience....[Volckmer's] gleeful provocation, like that of Ottessa Moshfegh, is never in service to glib nihilism or amorality. In fact, this is a deeply moral book, one that, beneath the graphic sex talk and raucous vitriol, is concerned with contemporary Europe’s historical trauma, the oppressiveness of traditional gender roles, and one’s personal responsibility to the past...Consider The Appointment a warning shot fired across the bow of the modern novel." —The Slant
“The Appointment is an epic truth bomb, a radical, hilarious roller-coaster, raw and wild as they come. The way this novel delights in itself, taking pleasure in its singularity and perversity, is the perfect antidote to boredom and bullshit.” —Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
“The most audacious novel I have read in years. It’s both vagina monologue and virtuoso performance...horribly funny and shockingly good...if the best writing takes a risk, this is Russian roulette.” —Frances Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
“Katharina Volckmer is a wild new talent, and unlike, say, twentieth-century Europe, The Appointment succeeds in justifying its obscenities." —Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers
“The Appointment is darkly hilarious, moving and original. Its vibrant, incisive voice surprises and enlivens the reader on every page." —Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy
“The Appointment is transgressive, spiky, full of ideas but astonishingly light-footed, written in beautiful, unsettling prose, and very, very funny—in short, everything a novel should be.” —Adam Biles, author of Feeding Time
“The Appointment is a wonderful first novel—at once savage and precise, hypercomical and furious. It has all the authority of true chutzpah.” —Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid & Cute
“A book destined to enter the list of great monologues of literary history. If Dostoevsky’s underground man had read both Thomas Bernhard and Maggie Nelson, he might have conjured something as brave as this.” —Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History
“Radical and endlessly thought-provoking, this book is a bold examination of the relationship between nationhood and selfhood.” —The New Statesman
“Audacious...hilariously funny. The prose is immaculate, she captures you, buttonholes you from the very first page...It is better than it has any right to be for a first book.” —John Mitchinson, Backlisted
Kirkus Reviews
2020-06-03
A stream-of-consciousness monologue by a woman in a doctor’s office.
At the center of this startling debut novel is a woman in the midst of a medical appointment. The precise nature of that appointment only gradually becomes clear, as hints accumulate, but the woman’s name is never shared. The novel itself takes the form of a stream-of-consciousness monologue the woman delivers, without pause, to a certain Dr. Seligman, who goes on examining her without ever stopping to speak. The content of her monologue varies widely, from a kind of metaphysical riffing to a sexual fixation on Adolf Hitler she may or may not have invented during previous sessions with a therapist she’d been compelled to visit. “The only real conversations you can have in life,” she says at one point, “are those with strangers at night. During the day, there is no anonymity, and if you just start talking to people, you are a freak.” There’s also a former lover she refers to as K. and a family inheritance she’s just received. But her focus seems to be on gender, gender roles, and embodiment—its cruelties and caprices. Volckmer’s prose has a fluid lyricism even—or especially—when it is laced with profanity, which it often is. But her insights often fail to move beyond shock value to achieve real depth. Volckmer’s narrator, it turns out, grew up in Germany, though she now lives in London; Dr. Seligman is Jewish. The narrator turns repeatedly to the subject of the Second World War. She even ends the book by revealing where that family inheritance came from. Unfortunately, that ending, like much else in this intriguing novel, ultimately feels unearned.
Aiming for shock value over profundity, Volckmer glides past the subjects that might have made her novel truly unsettling.
