What Am I, A Deer?

Reviews / Votes

'[A] stunning achievement of narrative craft.... The pleasures of What Am I, A Deer? lie in the way its constituent episodes, themes and recursions crystallize into layers of insight on the hopes and fantasies that drive people to action. It is a funny, moving work that rewards thoughtful, careful reading - with breaks to listen to the songs and videos it references.'

- Arin Keeble, Financial Times 'Barton's prose is offbeat and witty, alive to the excruciating pain of clutching at a romantic fantasy. A good novel tells us about ourselves, scooping out our worst impulses and deepest hopes, and Barton does so with a disarming candour.... What emerges is a piercing study of yearning, and of the modern condition of feeling perpetually on the verge of one's own life.'

- Emma Loffhagen, Guardian 'Its prose tidal and prone to extending the briefest encounters into meditations full of associative logic, the novel is a brilliant, sustained monologue. Indeed, by laying bare a primal, feminine solitude - crafted by the narrator's selective interiority, buoyed by obsession, and further exacerbated by her work-abroad circumstances - the woman becomes an integral conduit for wider fissures between hoped-for escapist fantasies and a lonelier reality in which communication is fraught but worth braving. A woman's candid thoughts percolate in the striking, artful novel What Am I, A Deer?, about trying to fit in, love, and become self-aware.'

- Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews 'Barton writes in extended passages of stream of consciousness that sermonize on particular phenomena - karaoke, translation theory, people-pleasing, bisexuality in heteronormative contexts. The narrator's insights are often acute and very funny.... [What Am I, A Deer?] is an almost-love story and an almost-self-love story - one that celebrates drunken karaoke, violent crushes and the transcendent, fleeting joy of believing you finally understand your own life.'

- Zadie Loft, Literary Review 'In this sparkling novel of ideas, Polly Barton illuminates the shame of loving what other people love. How embarrassing to find your feelings perfectly summed up in a cliche, to sing a pop song and mean every word! In Barton's hands, the cringeworthy passions become tools of self-knowledge and keys to a philosophy of the glorious banal. Gaming, karaoke, drunkenness, romance - there is nothing more revealing than the everyday escape.'

- Sofia Samatar, author of Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life 'A tender and nuanced novel exploring love, obsession, alienation, work and language with an immense sense of interiority. Polly Barton is capable of capturing fleeting, seemingly unremarkable feelings with perfect precision that cuts through to the reader's very core - it made me stop and gasp several times as I recalled feeling exactly this way. It speaks to how we yearn to connect but often fail to truly see each other, and to the fundamental, gargantuan power of a crush. Karaoke will never be the same again!'

- Anastasiia Fedorova, author of Second Skin 'The protagonist of What Am I, A Deer? finds herself both Schroedinger and his cat on entering the Frankfurt tram, the office, and the 'black box' of the karaoke booth; inside and outside simultaneously, trying to figure out whether she exists and in a state of tingling oscillation. Polly Barton is the maestra of controlled dissolution.'

- Jen Calleja, author of Fair: The Life-Art of Translation 'Polly Barton's What Am I, a Deer? is a beautiful piece of writing. An expansive, ambitious, witty stream of consciousness, this is a novel of, and about, translation - not just linguistic translation, but the acts of self-translation we are called upon to perform constantly in the modern world; translating our experience via the disparate languages of personal history, intimacy and class. This a novel that confronts formally the fractals of the self, in a voice that feels confident and yet insecure, cerebral and yet vulnerable. I loved it.'

- Susannah Dickey, author of Common Decency 'I'm nuts about this book - a romantic comedy in the most wildly open and profoundly honest sense, a tour-de-force of the telling detail, an electrifying contemplation of our capacity for risk.'

- Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Deep House 'What Am I, A Deer? is profound, funny and true. With biting precision, Polly Barton marries the mundane with the transcendent, asking whether we can ever truly escape ourselves and the societal structures around us. Her prose is incisive, moving and beautiful - I loved it.'

- Jessica Andrews, author of Milk Teeth 'What Am I, A Deer? is a playfully and obsessively observed novel about the pleasures and humiliations wrought from the foolhardy desire for recognition. Barton's style of address strikes a brilliant balance between a camp-ish hyper-attention to the currents of power driving language and culture, and an earnest attention to the nuances of yearning. Like a Bernhard novel, What Am I is rich with inference, wacky enmity and genuine delight, the most striking of which is Barton's exquisite command of her sentences.'

- Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries 'I found my time with Porn: An Oral History unexpectedly moving. Barton's candid, generous style as an interlocutor allows her subjects to move fluidly between their sometimes contradictory instincts and intellectual approaches in a way which feels revelatory and totally honest and human. A pleasure to read, and a vital new work for anyone interested in sex and its representation.'

- Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings (praise for Porn: An Oral History) 'I wasn't expecting nineteen conversations about porn to make me feel as I felt after reading this book: grateful and hopeful and wide-open. Porn is a generous, intimate commentary on how we relate to one another (or fail to) through the most unlikely of lenses.'

- Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes (praise for Porn: An Oral History) 'Porn is a fascinating, timely and humane testament to the value of uninhibited conversation between grown-ups. Its candour and humanity is addictive and involving - I couldn't help but join in with the pillow talk! Reader, be prepared for your own store of buried secrets, stymied curiosities, submerged fantasies and shadowy memories to shamelessly awaken.'

- Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (praise for Porn: An Oral History) 'Porn is many things - a prompt for dreams, the outsourcing of fantasies, a heuristic for the construction of desire - but it is often omitted from our "spoken life", to use Polly Barton's wonderful phrase. In Porn, she manages to get people to talk about this subject both omnipresent and omnipresently swept under the rug, peeling off her informers' ideological armour to get at what they really like and why, and invites us to ask, without forcing any answers, what it means for an entire society to possess an entire guilty conscience surrounding a genre now constitutive of our understanding of what sex is.'

- Adrian Nathan West, author of My Father's Diet (praise for Porn: An Oral History) 'Polly Barton is a brilliant, learned and daring writer.'

- Joanna Kavenna, author of ZED (praise for Porn: An Oral History) 'Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence - Fifty Sounds is so much fun to read. Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let's call it a slant adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes.'

- Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (praise for Fifty Sounds) 'This book: a portrait of a young woman as language-learner, as becoming-translator, as becoming-writer, in restless search of her life. It is about non understanding, not-knowing, vulnerability, harming and hurt; it is also about reaching for others, transformative encounters, unexpected intimacies, and testing forms of love. It is a whole education. It is extraordinary. I was completely bowled over by it.'

- Kate Briggs, author of The Long Form (praise for Fifty Sounds) 'It seems fitting, somehow, that this marvelous study of the expansiveness and precarity of human communication is so woefully ill-served by a literal description of its contents. As in all great works of genreless nonfiction, all of the subjects Fifty Sounds is putatively "about" - Japan, translation, the philosophy of language - are inspired pretexts for the broad-spectrum exercise of an associatively vital and thrillingly companionable mind. This is a gracious, surprising, and very funny debut from a writer of alarming talent.'

- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction (praise for Fifty Sounds)