Review by New York Times Review
IDENTITY IS ONE of the central questions of our age, addressed individually, culturally and, perhaps most dramatically, nationally - or more accurately, internationally. As the British historian Frances Stonor Saunders writes in her essay on the subject, "Where on Earth Are You?," delivered as a London Review of Books lecture last year and published in that journal: "All borders - the lines and symbols on a map, the fretwork of walls and fences on the ground, and the often complex enmeshments by which we organize our lives - are explanations of identity. We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are." The topic of Stonor Saunders's essay is the ways in which our Western identities are constructed - by identification, data and recognition; by passports of various kinds and what they signify - juxtaposed against the lack of recognizable identity for the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have made their way to Europe, so many of whom have died at sea trying to cross the Mediterranean (more than 5,000 in 2016 alone). This is also, from a different angle, the topic of Jenny Erpenbeck's powerful new novel, "Go, Went, Gone." Erpenbeck, one of Germany's finest contemporary writers, has been acclaimed for her vision and imaginative daring. "Visitation" (2010) tells, with impeccable delicacy and calm, the story of a lake house outside Berlin and its changing inhabitants over decades. "The End of Days" (2014) imagines five different versions of the life of its nameless female protagonist, ultimately encompassing much of the 20th century's dark history. Her new book, elegantly translated by Susan Bernofsky and set in contemporary Berlin, tells the story of a recently retired classics professor named Richard who, widowed and childless, seeks focus and meaning in his life: "As it is, everything his wife always referred to as his stuffnow exists for his pleasure alone. And will exist for no one's pleasure when he's gone." At first, we encounter Richard as a man of considerable intelligence and erudition, but also as someone mired in his careful routines, in his mastery of banal quotidian detail: "The next day he mows the lawn, then opens a can of pea soup for lunch, then he rinses out the can and makes coffee. His head hurts, so he takes an aspirin." But fate brings him to a group of African refugees who have been camping in Oranienplatz. He makes his way to a meeting about their plight at a former school in Kreuzberg, and finds himself first frightened, and then compelled: "Often when he was starting a new project, he didn't know what was driving him, as if his thoughts had developed an independent life and a will of their own, as if they were merely waiting for him to finally think them. . . . Speaking about the actual nature of time is something he can probably do best in conversation with those who have fallen out of it. Or been locked up in it, if you prefer." What ensues is Richard's intellectual, social and spiritual blossoming. Someone who has known his friends for most of his life, he befriends men from Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger and Ghana, and learns the extraordinary, brutal and fragmented narratives of their young lives. He rereads his beloved classics and "experiences a shifting in his conception of the Greek pantheon": "Much of what Richard reads . . . several weeks after his retirement are things he's known most of his life, but today, thanks to this bit of additional knowledge he's acquired, it all seems to come together in new, different ways." In his mind, he gives his African friends names like Apollo, Tristan, and the Olympian or the Thunderbolt-hurler. He listens to their stories, and feels obligated to try to help them. His understanding of their situation isn't confined to the material - to teaching them German, or giving them money for a transit pass - although this is part of it. He must unlearn, too, his own preconceptions, his own sense of space, time and his habit of expectation. At one point he recalls that "when he and his lover had their penultimate arguments before she lefthim, she'd said several times that it wasn't so much the disappointment of his expectations that was the problem, but the expectations themselves. . . . At first his lover had jokingly referred to all these things he looked forward to as his vanishing points, an expression she later replaced with a different one: happy-ending terrorism." But for Osarobo, who has traveled from Niger via Libya and wants to learn piano but has never before touched the instrument; or for Karon, who has lived a life of itinerant poverty in Ghana, and has made his way to Niger, then Tripoli, then Italy, then Finland, then Italy again before arriving finally in Berlin; or for Rashid, who tells an agonizing account of losing his children in a shipwreck when fleeing war-torn Libya, and of his wife's subsequent rejection of him - for these men and others, Richard learns that expectation, even the merest shred of hope, has, along with everything else, been wrested from them. They have, it would seem, only their mobile phones: "The men feel more at home in these wireless networks than in any of the countries in which they await their future. This system of numbers and passwords extending clear across continents is all the compensation they have for everything they've lost forever. What belongs to them is invisible and made of air." Having grown up and lived in East Germany before reunification, Richard and his friends are closer, perhaps, than many Europeans to understanding the uneasiness of the refugees' lives. As his friend Sylvia observes, "I keep imagining that someday it'll be us having to flee, and no one will help us either." The ghosts that swirl around the Africans in their temporary home are theirs, of course, but also the "marauding troops" and "booted feet" of World War II. "Go, went, gone. The line dividing ghosts and people has always seemed to him thin," Richard reflects. And yet Richard's lucid awareness - of literary and historical resonance, of his own nature and temperament, of contemporary legal and cultural attitudes - cannot of itself alter reality. His practical attempts to improve his new friends' lives meet, inevitably, with mixed success. Nevertheless, Erpenbeck's novel makes a powerful case for Richard's evolution, and by the book's close we understand that his own life - so long controlled and closed down - has been emotionally opened and revitalized by his new path. In retirement, he faces not isolation and diminution, but companionship, purpose and a greater capacity to confront his own personal losses and grief. Erpenbeck's is a very significant talent. The novel's timely political subject, distressing and confounding, could easily have worked against its success: The risk of didacticism is high. Ultimately the novel can't entirely escape this element; but Erpenbeck's rigor, her crystalline human insight, her exhilaratingly synthetic imagination - uniting Grimm's fairy tales, the medieval catacombs of Rzeszow, Poland, a great line from Brecht ("He who laughs has not yet received the terrible news"), and the implications of Niger's significant uranium deposits - combine to make "Go, Went, Gone" an important novel, both aesthetically and morally. Richard, while by no means perfect, is a far less troubling protagonist than David Lurie in J.M. Coetzee's "Disgrace," and the ending of Erpenbeck's novel is notably more optimistic. But her novel, like his, dares to ask what becomes of identity and morality in the face of our globe's radical changes. CLAIRE MESSUD'S most recent novel is ?The Burning Girl.?
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
A newly retired, widowed classics professor involves himself in the lives of African refugees in Berlin, getting an education in geography, linguistics, and human suffering as well as a chance to reexamine the various displacements in his life. Initially just curious about the men demonstrating at Alexanderplatz and living in a tent city in Kreuzberg, solitary, Richard listens to harrowing stories. Fascinated by the starkness of the refugees' circumstances and their resilience, Richard discovers new compassion within himself. But there isn't much he can do to stop the bureaucratic grind of the German legal system or the cruelties of EU immigration policy. Prizewinning German writer Erpenbeck (The End of Days, 2014) spent a year working with African migrants, and it shows in her nuanced depiction of people who have largely given up the luxury of hope and have little to do but wait. She also bluntly reminds readers what is at stake for Germany and, by extension, the world. Erpenbeck sheds the formal experimentation of her earlier works to create a timely, informed, and moving novel of political fury.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The staid existences of elderly Berliners and the fraught, uncertain trajectories of African refugees intersect in Erpenbeck's melancholy and affecting novel. The conduit for this intersection is the widowed Richard, a recently retired classics professor, whose search for an occupation leads him to a nearby nursing home where a group of refugees is housed while the government deliberates regarding their right to live and work in Germany. Becoming a regular visitor to the home, Richard befriends Awad, a Ghanaian who had been living in Libya before emigrating to Germany, and Rashid, whose family was violently attacked during a religious holiday in Nigeria and who has not seen his mother in 13 years. Awad, Rashid, and the other young men, with their stories of violence and loss, share the traumatic experience of entering Europe via a perilous maritime route, in which "the passengers below deck had no chance at all when their boat capsized." Subtly, Erpenbeck (The End of Days) suggests that the refugees and the Germans have in common a history of displacement: Richard and his friends "are post-war children" who were citizens of East Germany, then saw the system "under which they'd lived most of their lives" collapse. The narrative emerges as an insightful call to conscience and an undeniable argument for our common humanity. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this sobering, intellectually acute work, retired classics professor Richard lives alone in Berlin, pottering about his autumnal existence until he sees a news report featuring ten African refugees conducting a hunger strike before Berlin's Town Hall. He's struck by the idea that they have made themselves visible by refusing to say who they are and begins following their plight, finally visiting a facility where several have been moved after an agreement with the Senate. His motivations are initially self-serving; he wants to investigate the nature of time, "something he can probably do best in conversation with those who have fallen out of it." But as the men speak matter-of-factly of their lives and losses, he begins to realize his ignorance, drawing closer and even inviting a man named Osarobo home to play the piano. Meanwhile, Hans Fallada Prize winner Erpenbeck (Visitation), whose East German background informs the narrative, clarifies the wrong-headedness of Europe asylum laws as she reflects on borders that can and can't be crossed and the pain of moving beyond the surface of things. VERDICT Occasionally slow-moving but a stunning and intimate look into the refugee crisis; refreshingly, the characters don't finally embrace sentimentally but inch toward understanding. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Searching novel of the Berlin refugee crisis by Erpenbeck, considered one of the foremost contemporary German writers."The best cure for loveas Ovid knew centuries agois work." So thinks Richard, who, recently retired from a career as a classics professor, has little to do except ponder death and his own demise that will someday come. What, he wonders, will become of all his things, his carefully assembled library, his research notes and bric-a-brac? It's definitely a First World problem, because, as Richard soon discovers, there's a side of Berlin he hasn't seen: the demimonde of refugees in a time when many are being denied asylum and being deported to their countries of origin. His interest awakens when he learns of a hunger strike being undertaken by 10 men who "want to support themselves by working" and become productive citizens of Germany. For Richard, the crisis prompts reflection on his nation's pastand not just Germany, but the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, of which he had been a citizen (as had Erpenbeck). Richard plunges into the work of making a case for the men's asylum, work that takes him into the twists and turns of humanitarian and political bureaucracy and forces him to reckon with a decidedly dark strain running through his compatriots ("Round up the boys and girls and send them back to where they came from, the voice of the people declares in the Internet forums"). Richard's quest for meaning finds welcoming guides among young men moving forth from Syria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, some unable to read, one confessing that he has never sat in a cafe before, all needful strangers with names like Apollo, Rashid, and Osarobo. In the end, he learns from his experiences, and theirs, a lesson that has been building all his life: "that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can't possibly endure." A lyrical, urgent artistic response to a history that is still unfolding. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
