What Am I, A Deer?

What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession – not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace. With astonishing existential acuity, Polly Barton’s formidable debut novel renders the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, in deliriously self-conscious prose that is at once propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny. Echoing with the sounds of Whitney Houston and The Cure, reaching for the sublime in dark, sweaty boxes, What Am I, A Deer? is an exhilarating exploration of authenticity, fantasy, romance and intoxication. 

Polly Barton is a writer and literary translator from the Japanese. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. She has published two works of non-fiction, Fifty Sounds, for which she won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and Porn: An Oral History. What Am I, A Deer? is her debut novel.

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Praise:

‘[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

‘[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

‘What Am I, A Deer? flirts with convention to amplify everyday strangeness. Its will-they-won’t-they dynamic is a jab at vapid romance, and an updated take on the distance between reality and illusion results in a resonant existentialist text grounded in modern anxieties.’
— Colm McKenna, Irish Times

‘What Am I, A Deer? is precisely the novel only Polly Barton could have written. Propulsive and funny yet philosophically profound, it translates reality for a generation struggling toward authenticity while mired in counterfeit and delusion, especially within ourselves. By doing so, it offers a subtle send-up of the human tendency to rationalize our own errant behaviors while condemning others. The philosophical question underlying the slim tome is: How can we know ourselves, except through comparison and classification? Barton offers no simple answer, only a meandering look at the joy and pain in self-discovery.’
— Kris Kosaka, Japan Times

‘Intense, atmospheric and often humorous, there’s much to enjoy in this deep and fragmented tale of unrequited love.’
— Rhianon Holley, Buzz Mag

‘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

‘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 cliché, 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 Schrödinger 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

‘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