The German Room is one of those diaphanous Argentine novels which is so slight it feels almost, but not quite, transparent. The narrator is a pregnant Argentine who is returning to Heidelberg, the city she and her parents fled to in exile during the Argentine dictatorship, fleeing a failed marriage. She has no active connection with the city, until she runs into Mario, a friend and fellow exile of her parents. However, this is in no way a turning point in the novel. Neither is her discovery of her pregnancy. Neither is the suicide of the Japanese girl who befriends her. This is a novel that seems to relish its lack of direction, as embodied by the protagonist. Life, the author seems to suggest is banal. We seek mystery to lend meaning to it, but this is just window dressing. Or at least the author appears to be saying so, until the mystical tinge of the final pages. There is a playfulness to Maliandi’s text, which has something in common with the writing of Schweblin and Chefjec, but all the same The German Room ends up feeling something like a milenesa en dos panes without the milanesa.
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