The Borderless Book Club in Berlin

That moment of the book club history just came...
We get into a Family Saga!
For this meeting, we travel across Korea and Japan through a sweeping story about migration, resilience, and identity.
Pachinko invites us to explore how history shapes individual lives and how families carry both the burdens and the hopes of the generations that came before them.
Through intimate personal stories set against the backdrop of major historical upheavals, the novel asks a powerful question: how do ordinary people preserve dignity, love, and belonging when the world around them constantly denies them a place?

About the Book
The story begins in early 20th-century Korea with Sunja, the beloved daughter of a poor but proud family living in a small fishing village. After an unexpected pregnancy threatens her future, she accepts a marriage proposal from a kind minister and moves to Japan, beginning a life marked by hardship, sacrifice, and perseverance.

The novel follows four generations of Sunja’s family as they struggle to build lives in a country that treats them as outsiders.
Facing discrimination, poverty, war, and social exclusion, each generation must confront difficult choices about identity, survival, and belonging.
Spanning decades and moving between Korea and Japan, Pachinko weaves together themes of family loyalty, cultural displacement, and the quiet courage required to endure history.

About the Author
Min Jin Lee is a Korean-American writer known for her powerful explorations of migration, identity, and the experiences of the Korean diaspora.
Her family immigrated to the United States when she was a child, and she later studied history at Yale University before pursuing a career in writing.

Curiosities
Lee spent years researching the history of Koreans living in Japan while writing Pachinko, conducting interviews and studying the social realities of the community.
Pachinko became an international bestseller and has been adapted into a television series by Apple TV+, bringing the story to an even wider global audience.

Upon request, we will go back to our April Book Selection and have a second chance to discuss it!
Let's delve into Rushdie’s “largest aesthetic achievement,” according to Harold Bloom and what scholars describe as fundamentally a study of alienation and hybrid identity: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.

About the Book
The Satanic Verses is a complex, magical-realist novel that intertwines multiple storylines involving two Indian expatriates — Gibreel Farishta, a famous Bollywood actor, and Saladin Chamcha, an immigrant voice actor in Britain — who survive the mid-air bombing of a hijacked plane and fall into a surreal fantasy world. Their experiences blur dream and reality, exploring altered identities, spiritual visions, and personal transformations. One of the key narratives involves a mythical city and a prophet figure named Mahound, whose revealed “verses” and tribal conflicts echo and reimagine early Islamic history in dream sequences that question faith, revelation, and authority.

About the Author
Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and essayist, born in 1947 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India.
He was educated in England and he rose to international prominence with Midnight’s Children (1981), a landmark novel combining history and magical realism to depict India’s post-independence experience; it won the Booker Prize and is considered one of the most influential novels of the 20th century.
Rushdie is known for his imaginative prose, layered narratives, and exploration of themes such as identity, migration, cultural hybridity, and freedom of expression.
His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses brought worldwide attention and controversy, significantly affecting his life and career.
Despite these challenges, he has continued to produce acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, including The Moor’s Last Sigh, Shalimar the Clown, and the memoir Knife (2023), and is widely regarded as a major figure in contemporary world literature.

Our October book takes us to Santiago de Chile, during one of the country's darkest periods. We will discover a story where love, politics, humor, and courage intertwine in unexpected ways.
Tender, provocative, and beautifully written, My Tender Matador reminds us that even in times of oppression, love and hope can flourish. With unforgettable characters and a voice that is at once playful and poignant, this novel invites us to reflect on identity, resilience, and the power of human connection.

### About the book

Set in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, My Tender Matador follows the life of an aging, openly gay drag performer known simply as the Queen of the Corner.
Lonely but resilient, she lives a modest life until she meets Carlos, a young and charismatic revolutionary who asks to use her house for mysterious meetings.
As affection gradually blossoms between them, she finds herself drawn into a dangerous political conspiracy without fully realizing its scope. Torn between her growing love for Carlos and the risks surrounding him, she must navigate a world of fear, repression, and impossible choices.
Blending romance, tragedy, satire, and political history, the novel is ultimately a moving celebration of dignity, tenderness, and the courage to love in the face of violence and prejudice.

### About the author

Pedro Lemebel (1952–2015) was a Chilean writer, artist, and one of Latin America's most influential LGBTQ+ voices.
Known for his fearless criticism of dictatorship, social inequality, and discrimination, he combined activism with art throughout his career.
Before becoming a novelist, Lemebel gained recognition for his provocative performances and powerful chronicles, giving voice to those who had long been marginalized by Chilean society.
His writing is celebrated for its lyrical language, biting humor, and deep compassion, capturing both the brutality of political repression and the resilience of those who resist it.
My Tender Matador, his only novel, has become a modern classic of Latin American literature. Through its unforgettable protagonist, Lemebel created a story that is both deeply personal and profoundly political, reminding us that love itself can be an act of resistance.

What a book club would this be without paying our respects to Russian literature?
Let's go to nineteenth-century St. Petersburg and encounter a story where absurdity, ambition, bureaucracy, and social satire collide in ways that are both hilarious and surprisingly thought-provoking.
Despite being so short, The Crocodile is strange, witty, delightfully unpredictable... Beneath its ridiculous premise lies a sharp critique of society, politics, economics, and the human tendency to rationalise even the most absurd situations.
The story invites us to laugh at its characters while also asking uncomfortable questions about progress, self-interest, and what happens when ideas become more important than people.

About the Book
Set in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, The Crocodile follows Ivan Matveich, a civil servant who is swallowed alive by a crocodile while visiting an exotic animal exhibition.
Rather than treating his bizarre predicament as a catastrophe, Ivan sees it as an opportunity to reinvent himself as an important thinker. As those around him debate what should be done, Dostoevsky turns this absurd situation into a witty satire of bureaucracy, ambition, politics, and society's fascination with fashionable ideas.

About the Author
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was one of Russia's greatest novelists and one of the most influential writers in world literature.
His major works — including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov — are renowned for their psychological depth and their exploration of morality, faith, freedom, guilt, suffering, and the complexities of human nature.
Yet The Crocodile reveals a lighter and more mischievous side of Dostoevsky.
His ability to treat the completely absurd as though it were perfectly reasonable is central to the story's charm.
The crocodile may be fantastical, but the human behaviour surrounding it — greed, vanity, bureaucracy, ambition, and the desire to appear clever — is unmistakably real.