Richard, the protagonist, is a recently retired professor living in what was formerly East Berlin. He lives a very orderly life with little excitement nor purpose. He watches the news, but like many, he doesn't feel connected to the issues he views. He is able to separate himself from the problems of others. When he passes a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz, he barely sees the demonstrators; he looks away.Because Richard is rather bored with his new life of retirement he decides to attend an inte...

A machete to the heart. An ambitious project masterfully completed. This is the kind of novel that could change deeply held convictions on emigration and immigration. A different kind of refugee story, told from the eyes of a post-war German retiree instead of an immigrant. A fierce comparison of life as the German professor has known it, first on the east side of the Berlin wall then after the fall of the wall, to the lives of the black refugees who first landed in Italy then fled to Germany fo...

Where can a person go when he doesn't know where to go? This book, about the current refugee crisis in Europe (specifically, Germany) asks this question and others - important ones, about what constitutes a border, about what separates us as human beings, about who takes care of whom and whose problem is it anyway? All great questions, and a big part of the reason why I wanted to read this book by Jenny Erpenbeck who is described as one of Germany's most important writers.She obviously writes

Very strong work by Erpenbeck, but I didn't like it quite as much as her extraordinary THE END OF DAYS. The set-up here is excellent - a recently retired professor, Richard, is aimless. He can't go into his nearby lake because there is a dead body somewhere beneath the surface, his wife has died, and he still has never quite adjusted to East Berlin after the wall was brought down and capitalism has arrived. He befriends (by a series of well-done coincidences) a group of migrants seeking asylum i...

Wohin geht ein Mensch, wenn er nicht weiß, wo er hingehen soll?“Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?"Citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent to feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one's life chances." Joseph Carens, The Ethics of ImmigrationBook 10/13 from the impressive 2018 Man Booker International longlist and another strong contender. The two previous Jenny Erpenbeck novels I have read, both translated into English by the

A worthy read but not compelling.This was the first novel that I have read by Erpenbeck, I judged the book by it's back cover, but the excitement and drama promised there, takes a few pages to appear and then is swiftly tidied away, which is consistent with the title and the narrative drive of the book, but still, it's not very dramatic.The novel concerns widower and newly retired classical philologist Richard who gets to know (view spoiler)[ or notice, or take note of (hide spoiler)] a group of...

I've had this book on my shelves a few years but it took being stuck at home and a Book Cougars readalong to get me to read it. Translated from the German, it's the story of Richard, a retired academic living in Berlin who encounters refugees and starts to learn about the complexity of issues and bureaucracy surrounding refugees in Germany. He is trying to help, or wants to, but is ill equipped. I must admit that while Richard as narrator can "explain" the issues better to the reader, it felt wr...

Delayed on this review - hesitated presumably for various reasons. So - a very sympathetic portrayal of victims of forced migration - from war-torn African countries to Germany from an initial landing in Italy. The book tackles the politics of decisions made about refugees: their right to assistance, their right to be heard and the responsibilities of the host country towards these people. Erpenbeck tackles head on what she considers to be a major failing on the part of the German Government, bu...

I'm glad I went to book club to discuss this with friends who had different perspectives, because I must say I absolutely loathed this book while I was reading it. Not only does very little happen, but the idea is that some privileged white guy just decides to bother a bunch of African refugees who are down and out in Berlin, observing their days in a voyeuristic fashion and questioning his assumptions in the process. And I found it unreasonably tedious for a book that had fewer than 300 pages.B...

It is sometimes argued that, in order to remain attractive, literature must keep far away from current events, from themes that are in the spotlight today. That may be true, but not entirely. Over the past few weeks I have read two novels that focus on the migration theme, the theme that nowadays rivals with that of globalization, identity and the climate crisis to claim our full attention. The result, my appreciation of the books was mixed. Materiaalmoeheid, 'Material fatigue' by the young, Cze...

Jenny Erpenbeck is a method-writer. For her first novella, she enrolled as a (pretend) pupil in secondary school for more than a month to write about the trials of adolescence. For her latest novel “Go, Went, Gone”, which tackles the plight of refugees in present day Germany, she spent an entire year talking to local asylum seekers and accompanying them on various appointments. As a result of this commitment, her writing feels like that of a German Sarah Moss – deeply inquisitive, analytical, pr...

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."(Martin Luther King)Words have been used to scare people into pulling up the drawbridge around the bastion of wealthy comfort that is Europe, words like swarm, or horde, or tide; words that de-humanise those suffering squalor and ignominy in Idomeni or Calais, suffering disease, starvation and abuse in Gaziantep or Suruc, suffering trauma, pain, loss. Words can humanise them again. Richard is a recently r...

3.5With its immediacy of topic, I found myself thinking of Ali Smith’s Seasons (soon-to-be) quartet. At first I wasn’t too engaged with this novella and I wondered if it was "too soon" for a fictional rendering. But, no, my biggest problem with it is that the narration is much more telling than showing. However, there are so many great things about the work, I hesitate to criticize it. I also wondered about the choice of narrator (and his depiction) at times, but I made my peace with that too, a...

I have read all of Erpenbeck's previous novels and novellas but I was unprepared for just what a raw and powerful human story this one is, a book which is always vital and engaging and gains power and weight towards the end. I don't think I can write a review that does it justice, so these are just a few initial impressions.Erpenbeck uses her central character Richard, a widowed retired professor of classics from East Berlin, to explore the lives and stories of a group of desperate asylum seeker...

This book feels like it was written with a translation in mind and to win over prize judges - unfortunately, I have to agree when "Der Spiegel" states that it also illustrates the poor state of political literature in Germany. While Erpenbeck's writing about the plight of the refugees and the dire situation many of them are in is really important and very well done, some of her analysis dwells on a dangerously simplistic viewpoint. But let's start at the beginning.Erpenbeck tells the story of Ri...

The best book I've read this year - a stunning achievement that feels both urgent and timeless. Erpenbeck writes with humanity, clarity and insight about the lives of a community of refugees trying to make something of their lives in Berlin. The narrator is Richard - a recently retired academic who becomes curious about a refugee protest and gradually finds his way into the lives of a small group of men living nearby. The plot is fairly minimal - the inhuman unfolding of bureaucratic responses t...

Novel Writing versus ReportageI hope Jenny Erpenbeck returns soon to writing novels; this one seems something else. Her Visitation is a poetic masterpiece; The End of Days tells one woman's life over the span of the twentieth century in terms of the many ways it might have ended, but didn't; the earlier Book of Words looks at a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a torturer's child. All are politically engaged. All tackle major issues of our times. But all are also novels. Admitt...

Go, Went, Gone or Gehen, Ging, Gegangen in the original German version of Jenny Erpenbeck's narrative dealing with the refugee crisis in Germany is a fictional tale enshrouded in a strong non-fiction polemic that argues for a more humane treatment of the countless refugees, most from sub-Saharan Africa that have seemingly overwhelmed the German legal system's ability to fairly & efficiently handle their cases individually. Not so very long after the gradual assimilation of the former East German...

My final job before I took early retirement and stopped working was as the only UK member of a global team. One of my colleagues was a German man about the same age as me. We would often take a few minutes at the end of a business call to discuss the competition we were having (which I won) to see who could retire first. We would also discuss our plans for when we finished our professional careers. Mine were self-centred and based on getting my photography from a hobby to a money-making enterpri...

Richard, a widowed, childless and recently retired professor of philology, becomes interested in the plight of a group of migrants living in a tent-city, (pro-immigration) protest camp in Oranienplatz in Berlin. The camp is about to be shut down by the authorities. At loose ends and with a great deal of time on his hands, Richard creates a new project for himself: interviewing, recording the stories, and teaching English to some of the African migrants, some of whom are moved to vacant space in