Out of the Sugar Factory
“Out of the Sugar Factory is W. G. Sebald meets Agatha Christie, with a remarkable touch all Elmiger’s own.” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Visitors
“This book has a way of dissolving into and altering your thoughts, much like sugar in coffee.…the text echoes the way we think and remember, the ways we make connections between disparate objects in order to at least approach understanding.” —Asymptote
Elmiger’s breakout novel is a staring contest with History: an effort to map the resonances and frictions introduced to the world by the sugar industry. But can any writing project contain such devastation?
The narrator of Out of the Sugar Factory, Dorothee Elmiger, is a writer and archivist—and possibly a hoarder—of objects and stories that speak to the profound impact of the sugar industry on the world. Seated in the room where her vast collection sprawls across the floor, she obsessively connects a violent global industry to our unsettled present and her own desires. Elmiger’s deeply researched and innovative novel brings together subjects as varied as the institutionalization of Ellen West, the Haitian Revolution, Chantal Akerman, and Karl Marx to uncover the vast network of entrenched relationships lurking just below the surface. Out of the Sugar Factory, in Megan Ewing’s matchless translation from German, is a prismatic account of a writer’s overwhelming need to tell a story that is true, to follow the sugar wherever it may lead.
Shortlisted for the German Book Prize
Nominated for the Swiss Book Prize
“This book has a way of dissolving into and altering your thoughts, much like sugar in coffee.…the text echoes the way we think and remember, the ways we make connections between disparate objects in order to at least approach understanding.”
—Asymptote
“A fascinating perspective on the workings of global capitalism…The book’s dot-joining approach might seem strange or avant-garde; but there’s nothing all that odd about Out of the Sugar Factory. If anything, Elmiger has found a way to describe something fundamental that gets overlooked, both because it’s so ingrained that it passes unnoticed and because you literally can’t see it.”
—review31
“This is a novel obsessed not with sugar but with abjection, uncertainty, creative groping, provisionality, desire and pleasure.…[The narrator’s] research uncovers the link between production and oppression; her notebook, however, comprises ‘dark whirlpools, in which everything, including everything peripheral, swirls with deafening noise forever around an unstable center.…The sugar factory is perhaps her own turbulent mind.”
—On the Seawall
“Out of the Sugar Factory is an incredibly compelling quest for meaning and companionship through borrowed stories, unorthodox biographies, parallel lives. Weaving her own experiences—and fictions—with those of the unreliable narrators of history, Elmiger builds a narrative that is more than the sum of its parts. The book is hungry, insatiable actually, approaching what she calls “boundlessness”…it probes the limits of individual life and expands what can be done with language, driven by the kind of illogic that gets us closest to truth. This is mysticism for today.”
—Elvia Wilk, author of Death by Landscape
“Out of the Sugar Factory is W. G. Sebald meets Agatha Christie, with a remarkable touch all Elmiger’s own. One of Switzerland’s most promising young writers reminds us that history itself is one great, sordid mystery that must be continually reinvestigated, even if it can’t be solved.”
—Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of The Visitors
“When I saw that Out of the Sugar Factory was being billed as a combination of Agatha Christie and W. G. Sebald from the Swiss author, Dorothee Elmiger, I knew the book would be an immediate win for me, and boy was I right. Discursive and pleasingly hybrid (somehow both fiction and research project), this book covers everything from the sugar industry and colonialism to Emma Bovary and Chantal Akerman to anorexia and obsession. Out of the Sugar Factory is deeply researched and beautifully written—a stunner.”
—Kelsey F, Powell’s (Portland, OR)
“Out of the Sugar Factory is challenging. It accumulates—quotes, dialogue, notes, and stories—making connections and observations as the author becomes more and more entangled in her subjects. It craves. I can’t wait to read more of Elmiger’s work.”
—Timothy Otte, Wild Rumpus Books (Minneapolis, MN)
“Out of the Sugar Factory is liberated from the corset of the novel, a celebration of storytelling, a daring expedition into the economy of power and desire and into the abysses of our collective phantasms. Elmiger is a poet, historian, analyst, theorist, and gifted storyteller all in one. Few books are as beautiful, as intelligent, as profound and playful, and on top of that, as brilliantly written as Out of the Sugar Factory.”
—Martina Süess, WOZ
“It is already clear that Out of the Sugar Factory will be one of this year’s most important books. This is because it delves into pressing issues, but deals with them in a hallucinatory way. And because of the precision and luminous beauty of her language.”
—Anne-Sophie Scholl, Die Zeit
Additional Materials
- “Any Single Thing: On Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory,” in Asymptote Journal
- Video Recording: “Exploring ‘Out of the Sugar Factory’ with Swiss Author Dorothee Elmiger in Washington, D.C.”
- “Swan River,” excerpt from Out of the Sugar Factory, in The Baffler
- Out of the Sugar Factory Reader’s Guide
- Request an Exam or Desk Copy
Upon my arrival in Philadelphia at the house where F. still lived with friends, I am given a bed in a small room or a kind of walk-in closet, a room that they collectively use as storage for all kinds of things. I sleep between backpacks and dumbbells, hiking boots and the damaged parts of a hi-fi stereo system.
After having filed my notes and photocopies in the “sugar” folder for a long time, thinking that I could follow the events, the persons and their desires, their lapses, without bringing myself into play—in this room I understand that this has always been a misunderstanding.
Lying there among the scattered things of others is my body, deeply involved in everything that happens and that I previously filed away as material.