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qurratulain0's review against another edition
3.0
Really enjoyed the parts about growing up in East Germany, but then it kind of transitioned into essays on literature rather than being a memoir.
jonfaith's review against another edition
3.0
Growth, as we read in Ovid, is a transformation, but not a forward movement.
This likely wasn't an ideal starting point for my reading of Jenny Erpenbeck. It is both personal and muted, perhaps self-conscious. Perhaps my vision was blurred? Perhaps there was excessive baggage I brought as a reader?
The opening memoir pieces recount a Berlin childhood, offering an unspoken allusion to that of Walter Benjamin. yet is this presumed to be a tragedy? Such depends on your idea of life in East Berlin. What is fascination is how Erpenbeck employs the idea of dead end street and how such offered safety as a child, a bare minimum of traffic allows children to frolic on the asphalt. the street terminates in the Wall. This theme is returned to at the book's end, when attention is paid to the refugee crisis. Suddenly after decades, crossing borders is topical in European circles, yet it isn't dead-end or one-way streets that are the prominent theme but rather blind spots. How we Westerners remain self-indulgent, knowingly oblivious to global suffering, and how we wish for a reprieve that the human suffering of refugees and the homeless inflict on particular burdens. I found these ideas compelling but the prose of author. I remain at a terrible loss as to why? The middle section largely culled from Award Lectures relates to literature and her time at a bakery and as an opera director. That felt the most distant.
This likely wasn't an ideal starting point for my reading of Jenny Erpenbeck. It is both personal and muted, perhaps self-conscious. Perhaps my vision was blurred? Perhaps there was excessive baggage I brought as a reader?
The opening memoir pieces recount a Berlin childhood, offering an unspoken allusion to that of Walter Benjamin. yet is this presumed to be a tragedy? Such depends on your idea of life in East Berlin. What is fascination is how Erpenbeck employs the idea of dead end street and how such offered safety as a child, a bare minimum of traffic allows children to frolic on the asphalt. the street terminates in the Wall. This theme is returned to at the book's end, when attention is paid to the refugee crisis. Suddenly after decades, crossing borders is topical in European circles, yet it isn't dead-end or one-way streets that are the prominent theme but rather blind spots. How we Westerners remain self-indulgent, knowingly oblivious to global suffering, and how we wish for a reprieve that the human suffering of refugees and the homeless inflict on particular burdens. I found these ideas compelling but the prose of author. I remain at a terrible loss as to why? The middle section largely culled from Award Lectures relates to literature and her time at a bakery and as an opera director. That felt the most distant.
kirsten0929's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
In this collection of essays, award acceptance speeches, and university lectures, Erpenbeck writes beautifully about her childhood in East Berlin before the collapse of the wall, about writers and writing, concepts like hope and freedom, and other general musings. Smart and insightful, this collection has definitely got me interested in reading her fiction.
dmelliott's review against another edition
4.0
Essays and speeches, so some repetition, but interesting insider reflections on GDR and the remerging of Germany, insights on Thomas Mann, and wonderful final speech on our commonality as refugees.
suejay27's review against another edition
Between the author and the translator, Erpenbeck writes with razor sharp clarity softened by the passage of time. If I can write half as well as her, I'll be happy.
clapton_pond's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
3.5
jbstaniforth's review against another edition
4.0
Often singingly well written and deeply thoughtful, sometimes meandering and slapped together out of past keynote addresses the author seems to have had lying around (some of which contain great writing and fine thinking).
marc129's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
For some time now, Jenny Erpenbeck (° 1967) is one of the better German writers. Her novels are not always easy to read, but they are always worth it. This is a non-fiction book, with a collection of lectures she gave on various themes. To begin with, the struggle with her East German past: like no other, Erpenbeck puts into words how traumatic the sudden disappearance of the GDR was, as if part of her own identity was cut off, and how derogatory the attitude of many Westerners still is about that past. She links this, as in her beautiful novel Go, Went, Gone, to how disruptive the life of illegal refugees in today's Germany must be. And she immediately opens that up to how life can fundamentally change for each of us from one moment to the next, and how that affects our own identity: “We know that transformations lie before us, we know that transformations lie behind us, and we know, according to scientific findings, that the present belongs to us for precisely 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past. That means that every 3 seconds, we produce ourselves again as strangers. What should I say, then, when I’m asked to say who I am?”
The most clever contributions in this book are about language, literature, and especially the act of writing. In very thoughtful, slowly digging circular movements, Erpenbeck exposes what a phenomenally given language is, and how literature both creates reality and exposes the unfathomability of that reality: “Literature tells us that what we know is never the whole truth, but literature also tells us that the whole truth is waiting for us, if only we could read. And with that, it begins to teach us to read, even if that lesson requires more time to learn than we have in our own lifetimes. It also teaches us — and here I include myself as a writer — that the truth never ends where we want it to end.” For Erpenbeck, the pinnacle of literature can be found on stage, where an inimitable play takes place between actions, words and silences, which can only be compared to music: “And so in silence, in every silence that is not dead and empty, but rather filled to the brim with what is truly essential, literature and music meet. Both literature and music are closely connected to this silence, in their essence they are nothing but interpretations of this silence, at least insofar as they aim to arrive at something like truth. And both music and literature — which creates sounds in our minds, even when we are reading silently — have the privilege that they can take those things that cannot or will not be spoken of directly, and make them audible in other ways.” This book is chock full of reflections and contemplations that testify to a very alert, empathic mind. Highly recommended.
bagusayp's review against another edition
5.0
Jenny Erpenbeck’s first nonfiction book has a mocking tone in its title, Kein Roman “Not A Novel”. In the past, she was often asked by people about what topic in the next book she is writing about, and it has been repeated consistently. So when the time comes when she finally writes something different, this time the title is really self-evident, Kein Roman. In a really intimate tone, Erpenbeck shares many of her thoughts and reflections in a collection of writings between 1992 and 2018, which reveals many of her influences as well as her views on contemporary society.
In [b:Visitation|11221767|Visitation|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343851418l/11221767._SY75_.jpg|10864336], Erpenbeck explores the concept of Heimat, a German word that has no equivalent in English, which roughly translates into “Home(land)”. The main character is really bizarre, not a person, but a house by a summer lake located southeast of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg. The house has witnessed three families, five generations of people lived inside itself through the span of time in the twentieth century, from the Weimar Republic in the 1920s to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. The proprietors of the house keep changing, with only the Gardener who remains throughout the story, who is simply there without questioning anything, just like Mother Nature that keeps watching us from afar. The search for a home is a never-ending journey for humans throughout history.
The next novel of Erpenbeck that I have read, [b:The End of Days|26174870|The End of Days|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440682867l/26174870._SY75_.jpg|21570955], explores numerous nameless individuals as well and also chronicling the story of a woman who has died several times throughout the twentieth century and led different lives in each alternate universe where she did not die. At the turn of the century, a female baby has just died in a town in Galicia, at that time a constituent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What would the baby do if she did not die? Does a day on which a life comes to an end is still far from the end of days? In this story, Erpenbeck explores the unique perspective of the multiple roles that a person could hold, in the case that she did not die. She could be a daughter, a mother, an activist of the Communist Party in both Austria and Moscow, a widow whose husband was arrested during Stalin’s Great Purge, and many more infinite possibilities.
And in her critically-acclaimed [b:Go, Went, Gone|36217818|Go, Went, Gone|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505070316l/36217818._SY75_.jpg|46013087], Erpenbeck took on the task of putting into the plate the European refugee crisis which deserves more attention similar to her own experience of living in a different country after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Marienfelde district in West Berlin used to bear witness to many East Germans committing Republikflucht before the Wall finally sealed the way out for the East Germans after 1961. After the fall of the Wall, many West Berliners greeted their eastern neighbours with smiles, and even West Germany embraced their new citizens with the “welcome money” of 100 Deutschemark following the German reunification. Yet the refugees from Africa and the Middle East do not experience similar reception in Germany. Many people condemned the Berlin Wall and mourned its victims during the 28 years of its existence, yet few voices condemn the way many boats drowned in the Mediterranean, and there’s this uneasiness about the differences of the treatment to similar displacement which significance was diminuted due to geopolitical reasons. Where can a person go where he doesn’t know where to go?
Not A Novel is like a meditation for what Erpenbeck has written about previously. She questions the nature of people’s attitude toward the German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists, which is still being condemned as a violator of human rights and proof of the failure of the socialist experiment of the twentieth century. Many former East Germans describe their former lives in the GDR as ein ganz normales Leben “A perfectly normal life”, according to Mary Fulbrook’s [b:The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker|940077|The People's State East German Society from Hitler to Honecker|Mary Fulbrook|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328869930l/940077._SX50_.jpg|925040]. Similarly, Erpenbeck also recounts many happy stories of her childhood, growing up in East Berlin about which she says: “There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth.” Quite a good metaphor, through the innocence of a child growing up in East Berlin, the sight of the Wall might as well be the ends of the earth.
She also brings to attention, the notion of freedom, a word that has come into many usages with regards to the fall of the Wall. In the essay Homesick for Sadness, Erpenbeck questions “… Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’re finished shopping?)” The price of freedom, as Erpenbeck reflects, is her life until that point which suddenly belongs to the past. Suddenly people talked about money, the real estate prices skyrocketed, and even former apartment owners attempted to claim their ownerships for properties confiscated by the East German government after they left for the West. A new standard suddenly used to measure success, and in this turbulent transition era, Erpenbeck decided to write.
Erpenbeck’s creative process as a writer is being laid bare in this volume. She was only 22 when the Wall fell, and still a university student. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, many former East Germans suddenly found themselves unemployed in the reunified Germany. A new standard is kicking in, and it is no exception for Erpenbeck who studied to become an opera director, she couldn’t find employment except at a bakery where she arrived at work early in the morning and repeated the same sequences over and over again. It was the 1990s, and Erpenbeck began writing [b:The Old Child and Other Stories|557074|The Old Child and Other Stories|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348452540l/557074._SY75_.jpg|544260], carrying the baggage of her past memories in the GDR and hiding inside her nameless character who pretends to be fourteen years old.
She grew up in a long line family of writers. Her paternal grandparents, Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner, were critically-acclaimed writers of their time who lived in exile in the Soviet Union during Hitler’s rule and returned to help to construct a new socialist state in the eastern part of Germany. Her father, John Erpenbeck, has already published several novels before the fall of the Wall. And her mother, Doris Kilias was an Arabic translator who translated the works of the Egyptian Nobel laureate [a:Naguib Mahfouz|5835922|Naguib Mahfouz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1448319849p2/5835922.jpg] into German. Looking at her biography, it looks natural enough that Jenny Erpenbeck herself will turn into a writer, yet it was the fall of the Wall that brought her voice to a reunified Germany. Coming of age at the end of history is a turning point for Erpenbeck, who decided to write against the silence of the time.
This volume is probably a testament to Erpenbeck’s commitment to bring voices of the people who are silenced by the change of tides in history, people who suddenly faced displacement and questioned the nature of Heimat. Her writings could touch upon numerous issues and I could see her genuine concerns for some particular problems. Despite the fact that this volume is not translated by [a:Susan Bernofsky|162943|Susan Bernofsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387252348p2/162943.jpg], Erpenbeck's translator for her previous literary works, [a:Kurt Beals|7858129|Kurt Beals|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] could bring the voice of Erpenbeck nicely here.
Hearing her talks several times through podcast episodes and recorded YouTube lectures, Erpenbeck likes to interject difficult questions posed by her audiences with the funny remark “That’s an interesting question”, before jokingly laughs, after which she explains to the audience that she writes slowly short-hand with the typing sounds “Chak, chak, chak” slowly, instead of “Chak, chak, chak, chak, chak” that was typed faster through the keyboard of some of her fellow writers. She enjoys the moment, covets time in her own space, and creates a universe of her own to recount the story of others.
In [b:Visitation|11221767|Visitation|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343851418l/11221767._SY75_.jpg|10864336], Erpenbeck explores the concept of Heimat, a German word that has no equivalent in English, which roughly translates into “Home(land)”. The main character is really bizarre, not a person, but a house by a summer lake located southeast of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg. The house has witnessed three families, five generations of people lived inside itself through the span of time in the twentieth century, from the Weimar Republic in the 1920s to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. The proprietors of the house keep changing, with only the Gardener who remains throughout the story, who is simply there without questioning anything, just like Mother Nature that keeps watching us from afar. The search for a home is a never-ending journey for humans throughout history.
The next novel of Erpenbeck that I have read, [b:The End of Days|26174870|The End of Days|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440682867l/26174870._SY75_.jpg|21570955], explores numerous nameless individuals as well and also chronicling the story of a woman who has died several times throughout the twentieth century and led different lives in each alternate universe where she did not die. At the turn of the century, a female baby has just died in a town in Galicia, at that time a constituent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What would the baby do if she did not die? Does a day on which a life comes to an end is still far from the end of days? In this story, Erpenbeck explores the unique perspective of the multiple roles that a person could hold, in the case that she did not die. She could be a daughter, a mother, an activist of the Communist Party in both Austria and Moscow, a widow whose husband was arrested during Stalin’s Great Purge, and many more infinite possibilities.
And in her critically-acclaimed [b:Go, Went, Gone|36217818|Go, Went, Gone|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1505070316l/36217818._SY75_.jpg|46013087], Erpenbeck took on the task of putting into the plate the European refugee crisis which deserves more attention similar to her own experience of living in a different country after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Marienfelde district in West Berlin used to bear witness to many East Germans committing Republikflucht before the Wall finally sealed the way out for the East Germans after 1961. After the fall of the Wall, many West Berliners greeted their eastern neighbours with smiles, and even West Germany embraced their new citizens with the “welcome money” of 100 Deutschemark following the German reunification. Yet the refugees from Africa and the Middle East do not experience similar reception in Germany. Many people condemned the Berlin Wall and mourned its victims during the 28 years of its existence, yet few voices condemn the way many boats drowned in the Mediterranean, and there’s this uneasiness about the differences of the treatment to similar displacement which significance was diminuted due to geopolitical reasons. Where can a person go where he doesn’t know where to go?
Not A Novel is like a meditation for what Erpenbeck has written about previously. She questions the nature of people’s attitude toward the German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists, which is still being condemned as a violator of human rights and proof of the failure of the socialist experiment of the twentieth century. Many former East Germans describe their former lives in the GDR as ein ganz normales Leben “A perfectly normal life”, according to Mary Fulbrook’s [b:The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker|940077|The People's State East German Society from Hitler to Honecker|Mary Fulbrook|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328869930l/940077._SX50_.jpg|925040]. Similarly, Erpenbeck also recounts many happy stories of her childhood, growing up in East Berlin about which she says: “There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth.” Quite a good metaphor, through the innocence of a child growing up in East Berlin, the sight of the Wall might as well be the ends of the earth.
She also brings to attention, the notion of freedom, a word that has come into many usages with regards to the fall of the Wall. In the essay Homesick for Sadness, Erpenbeck questions “… Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’re finished shopping?)” The price of freedom, as Erpenbeck reflects, is her life until that point which suddenly belongs to the past. Suddenly people talked about money, the real estate prices skyrocketed, and even former apartment owners attempted to claim their ownerships for properties confiscated by the East German government after they left for the West. A new standard suddenly used to measure success, and in this turbulent transition era, Erpenbeck decided to write.
Erpenbeck’s creative process as a writer is being laid bare in this volume. She was only 22 when the Wall fell, and still a university student. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, many former East Germans suddenly found themselves unemployed in the reunified Germany. A new standard is kicking in, and it is no exception for Erpenbeck who studied to become an opera director, she couldn’t find employment except at a bakery where she arrived at work early in the morning and repeated the same sequences over and over again. It was the 1990s, and Erpenbeck began writing [b:The Old Child and Other Stories|557074|The Old Child and Other Stories|Jenny Erpenbeck|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348452540l/557074._SY75_.jpg|544260], carrying the baggage of her past memories in the GDR and hiding inside her nameless character who pretends to be fourteen years old.
She grew up in a long line family of writers. Her paternal grandparents, Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner, were critically-acclaimed writers of their time who lived in exile in the Soviet Union during Hitler’s rule and returned to help to construct a new socialist state in the eastern part of Germany. Her father, John Erpenbeck, has already published several novels before the fall of the Wall. And her mother, Doris Kilias was an Arabic translator who translated the works of the Egyptian Nobel laureate [a:Naguib Mahfouz|5835922|Naguib Mahfouz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1448319849p2/5835922.jpg] into German. Looking at her biography, it looks natural enough that Jenny Erpenbeck herself will turn into a writer, yet it was the fall of the Wall that brought her voice to a reunified Germany. Coming of age at the end of history is a turning point for Erpenbeck, who decided to write against the silence of the time.
This volume is probably a testament to Erpenbeck’s commitment to bring voices of the people who are silenced by the change of tides in history, people who suddenly faced displacement and questioned the nature of Heimat. Her writings could touch upon numerous issues and I could see her genuine concerns for some particular problems. Despite the fact that this volume is not translated by [a:Susan Bernofsky|162943|Susan Bernofsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1387252348p2/162943.jpg], Erpenbeck's translator for her previous literary works, [a:Kurt Beals|7858129|Kurt Beals|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] could bring the voice of Erpenbeck nicely here.
Hearing her talks several times through podcast episodes and recorded YouTube lectures, Erpenbeck likes to interject difficult questions posed by her audiences with the funny remark “That’s an interesting question”, before jokingly laughs, after which she explains to the audience that she writes slowly short-hand with the typing sounds “Chak, chak, chak” slowly, instead of “Chak, chak, chak, chak, chak” that was typed faster through the keyboard of some of her fellow writers. She enjoys the moment, covets time in her own space, and creates a universe of her own to recount the story of others.