I picked this up in Berlin while visiting for a Radiohead concert. For me, Radiohead and Bowie inhabit the same creative universe, even though I knew far less about Bowie at the time.

The book itself is deliberately chaotic. A lot is happening at once: the timeline jumps back and forth, characters appear without much explanation, and the narrative can feel disorienting. Kleist uses a color palette to distinguish locations—a clever visual device that helps, even if it doesn’t fully tame the disorder.

This is not a book you should approach cold. You really need at least a basic grasp of Bowie’s Berlin period (a quick Wikipedia read helps), and—more importantly—you should listen to the music from that era alongside it. That music turned out to be far greater than I had expected: sophisticated, daring, and it gave me literal goosebumps.

With that context, the chaos suddenly makes sense. The fragments align, and the book’s style, mood, and narrative rhythm begin to mirror the music itself. What initially felt confusing becomes expressive and intentional.