After a short but fun break in Berlin, it’s time to return to our literary muttons and take part in the monthly #6Degrees of Separation meme hosted by Kate. This month’s literary chain starts with The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop, which I haven’t read and haven’t seen around in the UK, but which sounds interesting potentially, with its theme of creative couples and how they handle each other’s success. Perhaps reminiscent of the film Anatomy of a Fall?
I opted for another unequal (in terms of power) couple for my first link, namely the troubled relationship between Hans and Katharina in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos. Many readers found the age difference and cruelty uncomfortable, but it worked well for me as a metaphor for the GDR.
Another GDR story (or set of stories, despite its slender form) is The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider, published back in 1982. Or rather, it’s about the lives of ordinary people trying to survive in a divided city, on either side of the Wall, and trying to escape the wall in their own minds.
My next link is to another author named Peter, namely Peter Ackroyd and his strange, fascinating novel about London, architecture and satanism, calledHawksmoor. It’s that esoteric mix of history, erudition, speculative or fantastical fiction, but also detective fiction, that seemed to be hugely popular in the 1980s. So of course I had to include Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum next, as that was my YA literature at the time.
I’ll stick to literary detection and another book I adored in my youth (and would like to reread), namely Possession by A.S. Byatt. I certainly dreamed of finding a partner in love and research as Roland and Maud (and I think I might have used it before in a 6 Degrees post, but I don’t even care!)
A.S. Byatt died recently, towards the end of 2023, so my final link is to another author whose recent death left me quite saddened, Paul Auster and his New York Trilogy, which was exhilarating and quite unlike anything I’d read before.
Coincidentally, all of my choices this month seem to have a link with the 1980s – either set during that time period or published then. And I have travelled from Berlin to London, Paris (and Milan) to London once more, and finally ended up in New York. Where will your Six Degrees take you?
Original edition of the complete trilogy. They were published as individual volumes in 1985 and 1986, but have since appeared in a one-volume edition.
Sourcing the longlisted books can be an expensive and difficult business, as my local library only has a couple of them, but I have had a chance to read three of the books since the longlist was announced on Monday 11th March, so am hopefully on track to read most of them before the shortlist in April. However, the reviews will be quite short, because I will provide a more in-depth review of the shortlisted titles.
Andrey Kurkov: The Silver Bone, transl. Boris Dralyuk, Collins.
This was the only one of the longlist that I already had downloaded on my Kindle, not because I predicted that it would be longlisted, but because I like crime fiction generally, have been a Kurkov fan since Death and the Penguin, saw him speak a couple of months ago and heard about his struggles to get back into writing fiction when his country is at war.
It’s set in Kyiv in 1919 and is about a very confusing and painful period in Ukrainian and Russian history, in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. There are many details about hunger, violence, ideological contradictions, rapid changes which reminded me of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Moscow Diaries from the same period. But there is also a fantasy element to it, a cut-off ear stuffed in a drawer which can eavesdrop on people, that could have come straight from Bulgakov or Gogol – probably a deliberate choice, since both of those writers have strong Ukrainian links, although they wrote in Russian, just like Kurkov himself.
The two contrasting covers to the book probably show the lack of certainty as to what this book is exactly. The dark cover seems to indicate a noir novel, but it is too slow-paced to satisfy crime fiction aficionados, too full of historical details and descriptions, with a forgettable whodunit element that I really didn’t care about solving. However, as an insight into a particular time and place, it is fascinating – yes, quite anti-Russian, as some reviewers have pointed out, but there are some decent Russian characters there too. There are also satirical strands to it – or rather absurd and grotesque elements, to fit in with an absurd and grotesque period of history – but overall it does not strike me as a humorous or cosy crime book in any way other than the fantasy element of the hidden ear, which is why the white cover feels a bit off. Personally, I’d have preferred a cover featuring a historical image of Kyiv during that period, but publishers probably feared that might make it look too much like non-fiction.
Although it’s competently written and well translated, I’m a bit puzzled why this one made the longlist. There isn’t a single paragraph there that makes me think ‘This is so beautifully written, I want to share it with the whole world’ – maybe it is a sort of recognition of Kurkov’s body of work and because it feels relevant to the present day? It is not one of his strongest or most imaginative novels in terms of literary prizes, but I will certainly continue to read this series as a crime fiction fan.
Ia Grenberg: The Details, transl. Kira Josefsson, Wildfire.
This book, as the cover indicates, is made up of four vignettes, four portraits of important people in the narrator’s life, in non-chronological order, with the narrator looking back on her youthful escapades from a vantage point of twenty-plus years.
Through the descriptions of these people and the relationship they forge with the narrator, we of course get a better understanding of the narrator herself. We are all shaped by the people we come into contact with, or at least the ones we have most loved or hated or been obsessed by. The other way in which we get to know the narrator is through the shared books – the ones that she and her friends/lovers discuss or love or hate.
It’s a quiet, short book, easily read one sitting, with several passages about a procrastinating writer where I smiled in rueful recognition, as well as general ruminations about the world which gradually reveal things about the narrator – in some cases subtly, in other cases more obviously. The author’s approach is captured best in a quote about one of the briefest and most mysterious episodes in her life, the section entitled Alejandro:
…what he told me, the information he shared with me, I carefully committed to memory with a view to recounting it to Sally and others who might ask, and perhaps also for the benefit of future me, but the information was just the container and not by any stretch the details that woke me up the next morning, heart thumping…
It’s these details that the author tries to capture, the unspoken, the gesture, just what it is that makes our heart beat faster when we see a person, or forgive them or abandon them. It’s a perfectly nice novella, with flashes of wit and lyricism, but once again I was slightly puzzled about its inclusion in the longlist. I’ve read many books that were equally as good that would have been eligible for the prize. I’ve also read some Romanian books that were on par with this, but which are not getting translated…
Jenny Erpenbeck: Kairos, transl. Michael Hofmann, Granta.
A love story set during the cusp of transformation in East Berlin in the late 1980s – this was always going to be catnip for me, so I thought I could not be entirely objective about it. And I’m probably not, for I love a blend of the personal and political, and have always felt close to Erpenbeck’s own experience.
I loved all the descriptions of life in the city before and after the collapse of the Wall, and this went a long way toward quashing my reservations about the love story. The masochistic and punitive aspects of the love affair made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I had to remind myself repeatedly that the love story itself – between the authoritarian, gaslighting, egocentric older man and the naive, often passive younger woman – is a metaphor for those of us living under Communism.
Once again, the main protagonist, Katharina, is remembering the past from a safe distance, but there is a final twist which makes her question all her memories – and makes us rethink all that we believe we know about their story.
Of the three I’ve read so far, Kairos is the one that I hope to see on the shortlist, and that I want to analyse in more detail, from the title itself, with its ‘seize the moment, but make sure it’s the right moment’ kind of guarded urgency, to the double disillusionment of both the love affair and the social order (socialism AND capitalism). This is no Ostalgie, but a clever and affecting look at how major historical changes affect two different generations.
I blatantly stole this idea from book blogger Gordon at Grab This Book, who invites crime authors every week to share five books, one from each of the last five decades, which they think should really be in everyone’s library. I thought that no one will invite me to do such a thing (at least not for the foreseeable future), so I might as well create my own post. Besides, it fits in rather nicely with my own five decades of life. I won’t stick to crime fiction, but will try to limit to books that I have on my shelves.
1970s
This is a toss-up between two books which actually have a lot in common: Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva (1972) and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979). Both are very short, both are a sort of stream of consciousness or philosophising about the minutiae of everyday life and the artist, especially the woman artist, and the sacrifices she still had to make to be able to create freely (and possibly still has, even now, fifty years later). Lispector’s novel was translated by Stefan Tobler in 2012.
1980s
I haven’t dared to reread this book, but back then it really changed my world; it was a sort of sexual awakening for me, all the more so because it weaved politics into love, and was forbidden in Romania for most of that decade. Which always makes a book irresistible: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Translation: Michael Henry Heim.
1990s
Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseille trilogy was all published during the 1990s, with my favourite, the middle volume Chourmo appearing in 1996. This is the dirty, smelly, criminal Marseille before its facelift (and City of Culture status) – yet full of colour, rhythms, diverse cultures, fully alive. Howard Curtis translated this work for Europa Editions, reissued a couple of years ago.
2000s
Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel (2002) is one of those romantic novels which I supposedly don’t enjoy. I loved this very loose adaptation of Wuthering Heights set in Japan, which skilfully blends a social fresco of post-war Japan with a timeless love story. I most certainly want to reread it. Translation: Juliet Winters Carpenter.
2010s
This is the decade that I started blogging and reviewing for other sites, so I discovered a lot of new authors and read more new releases than ever before. One author who really bowled me over when I first read her, even before she won the Nobel Prize, was Olga Tokarczuk, but the two books that have been published in English translation were both published in the original in the previous decade, so I cannot use that. I will therefore alight upon Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen (2015), which describes so well the fear of refugees flooding one’s country and the consequences of that, which have pretty much marked (and scarred) this past decade. You can find it translated as Go Went Gone by Susan Bernofsky for Granta.
As I prepared this post, I realised two things:
A. I cannot resist cheating, so I snuck in six books rather than five (or even more, if you count the trilogy as three separate books).
B. A lot of my favourites are older than the 1970s, so I will probably create another one for the 1920-1960 period.
Women in Translation Month is coming up very soon, and for this year, the founder and host of #WITMonth Meytal at Biblibio has decided to curate a list of the top 100 women in translation. You are all invited to take part, if you follow some basic rules:
I’ve selected ten books that instantly came to mind, without me having to go through my bookshelves in detail. I could have chosen so many more, but these are ones that have really changed my world, shaken my foundations, taught me what it means to be a woman and an artist and other such fundamental things. And, instead of telling you what the book is ‘about’, I will just give you a 3 word (or thereabouts) summary and a quote from each.
Looking at the list, I guess none of them are really cheerful, happy books, are they?
Simone de Beauvoir: Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) – bourgeois turns bohemian
I had wanted myself to be boundless, and I had become as shapeless as the infinite. The paradox was that I became aware of this deficiency at the very moment when I discovered my individuality; my universal aspiration had seemed to me until then to exist in its own right; but now it had become a character trait: ‘Simone is interested in everything.’ I found myself limited by my refusal to be limited.
Have the people living here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional anemia? Must living in peace – so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world – inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?
Veronique Olmi: Bord de mer(Beside the Sea) – depressed mother, heartbreak
You force yourself to live as best you can, but everything keeps fading away. You wake up in the morning but that morning no longer exists, just like the evening preceding it, forgotten by everyone. You inch forward on a cliff edge, I’ve known that for a while. One step forward. One step in the abyss. Then you start over again. To go where? No one knows. No one cares.
Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina – victim of imagination or men?
Some people live and some people contemplate others living. I am amongst those who contemplate. And you?
Murasaki Shikibu: Genji Monogatari(Tale of Genji) – shining prince ages
You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world’s decay.
Yosano Akiko: Midaregami (Tangled Hair) – poetry of female desire
A star who once
Within night’s velvet whispered
All the words of love
Is now a mortal in the world below —
Look on this untamed hair!
Clarice Lispector: Complete Short Stories – capricious, scintillating, sad
Mama, before she got married… was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about… liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter.
Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu: Drumul acuns (The Hidden Way) – social critique of inter-war Romania
The snobbery of Papadat-Bengescu’s protagonists is a defining trait of the Romanian bourgeoisie, of humble and precarious origin, without any aristocratic ancestry, and therefore keen to integrate into top-tier society at any price, either by falsifying their family history or by making unjustifiable moral compromises.
Critique from Autorii.com
Gabriela Adamesteanu: Dimineata pierduta (Lost Morning) – political family saga
How little of what lies within us we are able to convey through words! And how few of those words are received by others. And yet we keep on talking, firm in the belief that the sun of rationality will light up our souls… Otherwise, what would our lives be like if we view conversations as being as complicated as blood transfusions? It’s only when we’re at our lowest ebb that we are haunted by this suspicion, but we cast this suspicion aside as soon as we possibly can.
Marina Tsvetaeva: In the Inmost Hour of the Soul(or any other of her poetry) – quirky, passionate, ruthless
Simon Thomas from Stuck in a Book started a trend on Twitter a few days ago with an A-Z of favourite books: an author for every letter of the alphabet.
Oh HI book twitter!
I’ve decided I’m going to share 26 brilliant books – an author for every letter of the alphabet. It’ll be a gradual thread. It’ll be fun.
This is such a lovely idea, that I wanted to emulate it on my blog – although I will no doubt curse the thought once I reach X or Z.
A: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, of course, one of the most perfect novels ever written.
B: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal influenced me hugely in my teens and was probably the catalyst that provoked my own outburst of poetry at that age. I can still recite some of the poems by heart.
C: Another poet, Cavafy, whose collected poems I discovered much later, when I fell in love with a Greek man in my 20s. He had been forced to study Ithaka at school, and moaned about it, but I thought it was a fantastic poem and wanted to read more. The Greek man has since disappeared from my life (well, nearly… any day now… he’s a bit like Theresa May) but the love for Cavafy has remained. I have about 5 different translations of his work and can just about read the original Greek as well.
D: Dazai Osamu – I love all of the books by this nice ‘cheery’ Japanese author, but I have a soft spot for the first one I ever read by him: a collection of short stories which have been translated into English as Run, Melos! and Other Stories. The story from Judas’ point of view impressed me so much that I made my first attempt there and then at translating from Japanese.
E: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone impressed me very much when I read it at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe.
F: Benjamin Fondane is Romanian-Jewish poet, translator, literary critic and essayist, who wrote in both French and Romanian and sadly was exterminated in Birkenau in 1944 at the age of just 46. His poetry collection Privelisti (Landscapes) is my choice here.
G: A masterpiece of satire and absurdity, the short story The Nose by Nikolai Gogol.
H: A surfeit of good authors with H, but I think I’ll choose the witty (yet gentle) indictment of UN bureaucrats in Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses.
I: Who else but Eugene Ionesco, my fellow countryman? And because I love anything to do with language learning and the dangers of miscommunication, I choose The Bald Soprano.
J: Shirley Jackson has long been a favourite of mine, mainly on the basis of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which is one of the most chilling yet perfect novellas ever written.
K: Franz Kafka’s Das Schloss(The Castle) – the author was never in doubt, although it’s hard to choose between this, Metamorphosis and The Trial.
L: C. S. Lewis: The Silver Chair – the Narnia chronicles provided me with many, many hours of joy in my childhood, and this one was perhaps my favourite of the lot, because I could relate to Jill and thought Puddleglum was hilarious.
M: Murakami Haruki’s Kafka on the Shore is probably my favourite novel of his, and not just because it features lots of cats.
N: Gellu Naum was a Romanian surrealist poet, but he is best known for his delightful children’s book about the little penguin Apolodor who is trying to find his relatives in Labrador.
O: On my first (and so far only) visit to Canada, I discovered Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals and have been smitten with this author ever since.
P: I could go for obvious choice Proust, but I will opt instead for Barbara Pym. Less than Angels may not be her best-known or most accomplished novel, but she pokes fun at anthropologists in it and I just cannot resist that!
Q: A tricky letter, as you might imagine, but not when you have a favourite called Zazie dans le metro by Raymond Queneau.
R: Which one of Jean Rhys‘ haunting novels to choose? In the end, perhaps After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is the most quietly devastating one.
S: Antoine de Sainte-Exupery’s The Little Prince will forever be one of my favourite books, sorry, cannot be objective about it at all, cry like a leaky faucet whenever I read it.
T: A slight cheating going on here, but I want to make sure that Tove Jansson gets a mention, as she is one of my most favourite writers ever. Plus the title of this book of hers starts with a T too: The True Deceiver.
U: Another avant-garde Romanian poet (we seem to be good at writing about absurdity, perhaps our history has taught us to see the surreal comedy and oxymorons in daily life) is Urmuz, considered a forerunner of Dadaism. His works (short prose and poetry) have been translated into English, if you are curious.
V: Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo gets a few things wrong, so the Colombian storyteller who inspired him decides to tell his own version of events. Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana is a lively rewriting of literary history and Latin America’s riposte to Europe’s limiting vision of their continent.
W: I’m sure you all expect me to choose Virginia Woolf, but I will confound you by going for Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, which I read while visiting Granada as a child and had a lasting effect on me (again, very slightly cheating).
X: I love Qiu Xiaolong‘s Chief Inspector Chen series, set in a rapidly changing Shanghai in the 1990s, starting with Death of a Red Heroine.
Y: Very tempted to choose Richard Yates here, but instead I will mention Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, which should be far better known in the English-speaking world.
Z: Émile Zola is currently very much top of my thoughts, but it’s not The Debacle that I will be referring to here, nor Nana or Germinal, his best-known works, but the novel which supposedly brought about the end of his friendship with Cezanne, L’Oeuvre (The Work of Art), in which he somewhat satirizes the Bohemian art world in Paris at the time.
An extrovert week is followed by a more introvert one, perhaps also coloured by the tumultuous events at work. Students occupied part of our building and impeded access to workspace, training rooms and even fire exits, and we had all the excitement of megaphones, human chains, trying to reason with them and then being evacuated and finding refuge in the library. While I have every sympathy with their fear that universities are becoming too similar to businesses, I am not fully clear what their aims are or how we could help them achieve those. But it does bring back memories of idealistic younger days when we protested against Communism and (sort of) won that battle, and of course there are parallels with the March for Our Lives movement in the US. I hope that this younger generation will achieve something before they get too disillusioned by the inertia and selfish interests of the older generations.
March 20th was the International Day of the Francophonie, so I spent the evening reading some French poetry, which was perhaps my first poetic love (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire). I have a slim volume which is a good introduction to more modern poetry published by Gallimard: Mon beau navire, ô ma mémoire: Un siècle de poésie française (1911-2011). Gallimard has equivalent anthologies for each century, and this one features both well-known poets (such as Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, Aragon) as well as many poets that I am less familiar with.
This week I discovered the Norwegian crime series in 6 episodes Eyewitness on Walter Presents/All 4. Two teenage boys witness a crime at a sand quarry just outside their town and vow to keep it a secret, with all sorts of repercussions on their community and on themselves. It’s got great build-up of suspense and pacing throughout and manages to also be a love story, a tender mother and son/foster parents and child story, and to show how fallible and flawed even police detectives can be. Recommend, if you can access it. I very seldom binge watch, but I watched all 6 episodes over the course of just 2 nights.
I also succumbed to some bookish temptations. Upon hearing the sad news of the death of Philip Kerr, I borrowed one of the post-WW2 Bernie Gunther books from the library Prussian Blue, to see how Gunther copes with a post-Nazi world. I stuck to Germany when I ordered another novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, whose Go Went Gone I so enjoyed. This time it’s Heimsuchung (translated by Susan Bernofsky as Visitation), about a century of German history seen through the ‘eyes’ of a piece of land outside Berlin and the people who lived on it. Last but not least, the Japan Society left a comment on my review of Japanese novellas, and drew my attention to a dual language anthology of contemporary Japanese writing that they have just published. Heaven’s Wind is translated and edited by Angus Turvill and might help me get back into reading Japanese in the original once more. There will be a Book Club meeting dedicated to this volume on the 9th of April at the Japan Society headquarters in London.
There will be a break in my cultural events for the next two weeks, as holidays and the mountains beckon. However, if you are in France and not skiing, then you really should go to the wonderful Quais du Polar crime festival in Lyon, which this year takes place between 6 and 8 April. It will be my first time since 2012 that I won’t be able to make it, but I am sure Emma from Book Around will tell us all about it.
Happy Days in Lyon
France, Norway, Germany and Japan (plus I’ve just finished reading a crime novel set in South Afrida): where have you been ‘transported’ this week?
Jenny Erpenbeck has written THE most timely novel about refugees, although of course it’s just a coincidence that her book (which must have been written a few years back) was published just as Europe reached boiling point in discussions about the refugee crisis.
Gehen, Ging, Gegangen [Go, Going, Gone] is the story of refugees, but (wisely, perhaps) Erpenbeck does not write it from the point of view of the asylum-seekers themselves. Instead, we become acquainted with them through an intermediary: a retired and widowed German classics scholar, Richard. This is very clever, because Richard represents any one of us who is ignorant but a bit curious about the plight of refugees, and then finds his mind and heart expanded through his regular contact with them. Yet he is by no means an altruistic saint: he hesitates and makes silly mistakes at first, and when he finds his house broken into at some point, he immediately jumps to the conclusion that one of ‘his’ refugee visitors has burgled him but cannot quite confront him with this. And, although there are hints of selfishness in his personal life (and talk about a mistress), at the very end of the book, we discover some additional things about his marriage which put him in a rather unflattering light.
So Richard is very human, rather lonely and bored, and he happens to pass in front of the Red Town Hall in Alexanderplatz in Berlin and sees a group of men on hunger strike, protesting and refusing to reveal their identities or nationalities. At first Richard keeps his distance.
As a child, he’d learnt all about hardship. But that’s no reason, just because someone is desperate enough to go on hunger strike, for him to starve. So he tells himself. It wouldn’t help the person on hunger strike.
Richard was born during the Second World War and grew up in East Germany, so throughout the book he contrasts the poverty and deprivation of the young men he encounters with the life of his friends and neighbours under Communism. He starts out with a scientific curiosity and a rather comically naive questionnaire for the refugees, who have been moved to a hastily repurposed old people’s home. Gradually, however, he opens up his own heart and allows the men themselves to open up and talk freely, all the while treading a fine line between pity and patronage, companionship and superiority. He begins to distinguish between the men coming from Nigeria, Niger, Libya, Syria, Chad, even Touaregs. He learns how to pronounce their names: tall Ithemba, quiet Abdusalam, shy Osarobo, massive Raschid (and initially thinks: all refugees can’t be doing too badly, if Raschid is so big). Sometimes he creates his own nicknames: young Apoll, sad Tristan, thin Caron, who believes in ghosts…
He helps out with their German classes, he invites some of them back into his home to play piano or to read Dante (his only book in Italian). He is often embarrassed when he is invited to eat with them, knowing how they struggle to live on the tiny sums of money allocated to them. Most of them are boat people, who landed on the shores of Italy, and so have no right to claim asylum in Germany. They want to work, they don’t want to live off charity. They miss and worry about their family back home. Slowly, Richard befriends them and starts believing that he and a small group of friends can make a difference, that it is all about personal relationships, about small-scale understanding. He wonders about the artificiality of borders, the divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that people are at such pains to maintain:
Was the dividing line, the trench, between them really so endlessly deep and that’s why it caused such turbulence? Was it between black and white? Between rich and poor? Between stranger and friend?… Between one language and another? And how many borders were there anyway in this one universe? Or, to put it another way, which was the real, ultimate border? Perhaps the one between the living and the dead? Or between starlit sky and the clod of earth that he stepped upon each day? Or between one day and the next?… If you think about all these possible borders, then it seemed to Richard that the difference between one human and the next is ridiculously tiny and no deep trench at all.
Author photo from Deutsche Welle.
Of course there is no conventional happy ending: all the refugees have to return to Italy or be deported. There are only 12 exceptions out of 476 cases – mostly because of attempted suicide or ill-health, in which case they have been given a few weeks or months’ additional permission to stay before being deported. So Richard and his friends jump in to help and offer accommodation and there is a final note of humanity and warmth, despite the sadness of the last few pages.
For a really excellent review of this book (which we hope will be translated soon into English, all the translations above are my own weak attempts), see Tony Malone’s blog. There is also a fascinating interview with Jenny Erpenbeck on Deutsche Welle about the problem of being ‘visible’ only as a refugee.
findingtimetowrite 