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A review by jonfaith
Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces by Jenny Erpenbeck
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.