Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days

 "The end of a day on which a life has ended is still far from being the end of days."

Lives end pretty frequently for the female protagonist in Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days, people die around her, but those deaths also include her own. Four times she dies and we see what that death does to the people around her; four times, through the magic of fiction, she avoids her death and carries on; only the fifth, at the age of ninety does she die for good--or ill.

The protagonist (unnamed, so I'm going to have to awkwardly keep calling her the protagonist) is born in Brody around 1900, a town now in the Ukraine, but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She's the eldest child of a Jewish mother and German father.

I'm going to unpick Erpenbeck's structure and give the story of the protagonist straightforwardly; it's easier; but it's also the case the suspense is in how she dies, and revealing the causes of death feels a bit spoiler-ish. And there are so very many ways for a woman with that background to die in Eastern Europe in the 20th century. 

Her father is a civil servant with the Austro-Hungarian empire, initially working for the railroad, and of the lowest pay grade. Even in a provincial town, the family can barely make ends meet. A younger sister is born. The father has the opportunity to take a job with the meteorological institutes in Vienna. He moves up a couple of grades, but then Vienna is so much more expensive. Then WWI comes, the Austro-Hungarian empire is broken up, and Austria is impoverished. "One month's salary, if she [the girl's mother] stretched it skilfully, would last a week." The novel does have its moments of grim humor.

The opening quote comes from those years. The protagonist's best friend dies of the Spanish flu; the protagonist is half in love with her dead friend's boyfriend. At this time the protagonist is sneaking off from the house; the mother assumes she's prostituting herself, but in fact she's joined the Communist party. She writes a novel. She leaves for Russia and marries a German Communist there. (From here on in, she's referred to as Comrade H., or Frau Hoffmann, so maybe I will, too.) The years of the Stalinist terror come. Another dark joke:

"Three prisoners are sitting in a cell and they get to talking.

Why are you in prison?

I was for Bukharin.

What about you?

I was against Bukharin.

And you?

I am Bukharin."

After the second World War ends, Frau Hoffmann moves to East Germany. Herr Hoffmann is dead, but she had a child by another man and the child comes with her. In East Germany she's a celebrated author, but her reputation doesn't extend outside the Communist world. Late in life she suffers dementia and her son is forced to commit her to a nursing home.

The novel came out in German in 2012 and was translated into English by Susan Bernofsky in 2014.

Two of her four premature deaths are political; the other two more domestic. It gives a great sense of how contingent life was in that time and place. The Holocaust lurks, but none of Frau Hoffmann's deaths are caused directly by the Holocaust. It's a novel as history of the 20th century, like The Eighth Life (For Brilka) -- I thought this much better -- or Earthly Powers -- hmm, Earthly Powers is awfully good. I understand Erpenbeck was trying to universalize her character by leaving her unnamed, but it did sometimes lead to awkward moments in the prose, I thought. Still this was very good, touching and surprising both.

Ukraine, Germany, Russia and--though I still need Russia--Austria, which is how I'm counting it...

 

Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone

"Where can a person go when he doesn't know where to go?"

The protagonist of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Go, Went, Gone is Richard, a retired professor of classics who spent most of his professional career at a university in East Berlin. He's a lonely man. Widowed and childless, he has friends, but at first even they seem to be drifting away. He had a mistress, which made the marriage not an entire success, but now she's gone, too. At the beginning of the novel he's just wrapped up all the rituals of retirement.

He passes, without at first noticing, a protest in a Berlin plaza; a group of African refugees are living in the plaza, Occupy Wall Street-style, trying to draw attention to their plight, and maybe acquire residency and work permits. Richard sees the events on television he'd scarcely noticed in person, but decides to draw up a plan for a sociological inquiry, and uses his emeritus status to get the authority to pursue it. Does he mean to do actual research? Not really. It's just to satisfy his curiosity and give him something to do.

And not a lot happens. He interviews refugees. He becomes more involved, maybe does some good, assuages his own loneliness a bit. The novel ends with the refugees no better off than they were 250 pages earlier, but at least not sent back to Italy, where there is poco lavoro, nor to their various home countries in Africa, where they would be at risk of their lives. They've fought the German bureaucracy and didn't win, but at least weren't utterly routed.

Why do we read novels? There's no one answer to that question, of course. There are different answers for different people and even different moods. I read Mrs. Pollifax on Safari a couple of days ago, and today this--very different, and enjoyed both. Sometimes I read for story, or for escape. But then one of the reasons I read novels is to experience and understand the problems of societies, both of others and of mine own. This novel is as close to purely political, even didactic as almost anything I've read, and yet it's still powerful and affecting; part of that comes from the deep, lonely sadness of Richard as he claws his way back into something like life.

Go, Went, Gone came out in German in 2015 and the translation by Susan Bernofsky came out in English last year. Germany is one of the better European countries on accepting immigrants, or at least Angela Merkel made it so, pledging to take in a million asylum-seekers, quite possibly it seems at the cost of her political career and the rise of the party Alternativ für Deutschland. And yet, at least according to Erpenbeck, maybe not all that welcoming. I don't quite know the timeline of all this because I believe it was also 2015 when Merkel made her pledge, so it's likely Erpenbeck was looking at Germany before Merkel's action. In any case the novel shows plenty of institutional resistance to admitting refugees.

Canada patted itself on the back for taking in just 25,000 Syrian refugees (and I entirely approved of that). As for the U.S., well...

A fascinating book.

She's German and it's very caught up with contemporary Germany, so it definitely fits...