Norah Labiner’s new book, "German for Travelers" (Coffee House Press), is a novel about storytelling. It’s also a story about romance, family ties and the Holocaust, but the book is less about events than the telling of those events, which Labiner does in an almost experimental voice, part poetry, part wordplay — a mysterious, playful, do-not-look-directly-at-the-sun style of storytelling. It’s not just a literary trick; she approaches interviews in the same way. See for yourself:

MinnPost: The book is told by many voices. Were you tempted to stick with one narrator and one story?

Norah Labiner: In the movie of your life you are the main character. No one dreams of being Horatio. Every girl and each boy is Hamlet. You go about your life, and you don’t think: I’m the sidekick. Or I’m a girl: so I’ll play Ophelia or a stripper. Or, I’m the object, not the subject. You are the star of your story. I wrote this book in a third person overview style of narration because I wanted each character to have his or her little world.

MP: The horrors of the Holocaust were just offstage. Why did you write about it in this way?

NL: This was a difficult story to tell. I told it by creating the absence of the Holocaust in the book. Through the idea of a loss beyond my own comprehension. I generally know — when I start a book — where it will end, and nothing more than that. I had an image in my mind: an empty room in a house. I saw the curtains, the window. That was all. And I wrote the rest of the book, really, to find out how and why the room was empty. To find out what had happened.

MP: You wrote a previous novel [“Miniatures”] at a cabin in northern Michigan. Where did this book happen?

NL: The novel took seven or eight years to write. I wrote it in a blue room on the second floor of a house in South Minneapolis. I can’t say exactly where or when it was that the story took hold of me. In a buried memory, in a joke, or a question, in something overlooked or forgotten? In place or displacement? This is a novel really about how we construct ourselves through dreams and jokes and symbols. And about devices of interpretation: like psychoanalysis and the question itself. There is so much maddening fun, really, in being deductive, in playing detective, in solving a puzzle, untying a knot, or trying to figure out a riddle; but I leave this to the reader. The reader is the psychoanalyst. The book is the patient. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

MP: How did you research the historical events in this book?

NL: I read Freud’s letters and certain case studies. I haunted antique stores. I collected old photographs and grammar texts. I found water-logged paperbacks full of outdated maps and helpful phrases for travelers. After a while I stopped reading. And then I started writing. I wrote a novel set in several different time periods, and I wanted to be accurate, but I didn’t care too much about fetishizing accuracy. I was more interested in presenting the past as part of the present.

There is a way of looking at and reading the historical novel as an ongoing story. Certain facts stuck with me. I read that the 1936 Berlin Olympics were sponsored by Coca-Cola. And how the stadium was festooned with ads for Coke. It’s funny, but it’s terrible. And it’s terrible because somehow despite the whole of history, despite the things that happen and that have happened, for god’s sake, people are still drinking Coke. This is what I mean when I say that no story begins or ends.