THE END OF DAYS
By Jenny Erpenbeck
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| Writer Jenny Erpenbeck |
Too often the great works of other languages are not
translated for the English speaking reader. We miss out on a lot of great
fiction and different voices, and the stories that underscore other cultures.
Fortunately, German writer Jenny Erpenbeck is available now in paperback, by
acclaimed translator Susan Bernofsky, and THE END OF DAYS is worth reading for
the most serious reader.
Make no mistake – this is not entertainment, nor is it a
page-turner. It requires time, attention and thought, but it’s worth it.
The premise, like others that have recently taken on the what-if question of multiple lives,
posits the life of one single person who dies five times – first as an infant,
and then in each of the stages of life. This is not a spoiler, it’s the reason
to read. A literary-existential concept – what is the life we might have had? And
how does that inform the life we have lived?
Approximately eighty
years ago, an arts and crafts teacher in Vienna declared the work of one of her
pupils sloppy and shoddy. Is it possible that this pupil was given so long a
life for the sole purpose of having the sentence uttered by that loathsome
Viennese woman finally canceled out, buried by a new sentence uttered by a new
teacher? Has she been in the world all these many years so these two sentences
– to give just one example – can confront each other within her, and the good
one defeat the bad? Might everything that’s ever been said and that will be
said everywhere in the world constitute a living whole, growing sometimes in
one direction, sometimes in another, always balancing out in the end?
Paul Auster did a particularly wonderful version of this in
the novel “4-3-2-1” and Kate Atkinson explored a similar theme in “Life After
Life.” Both recommended.
Erpenbeck opens the novel with an epigram from Sebald’s
great fiction, “Austerlitz” in which he also said, At some point in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and
now I’m living the wrong life.” How many of us have had that thought once
or twice?
In END OF DAYS, in prose that makes you stop and read again,
and again, a female protagonist rides her five lives through five phases of
European culture. From the early 20th century through wars and revolution and
ultimately the dismantling of the Berlin wall. In these pages, politics is
personal and the personal does not exist in isolation from the politics. Characters
are haunted by Goethe, by the extermination of Jews, Russian supremacy, poverty
and corruption, and also redemption. They find it difficult to express their
feelings [extremely Germanic] and in their repression, they suffer almost as
much as our favorite Russians in Tolstoy. A lot of ground covered in just 238
pages. And much to consider about what composes a life.
When her husband – who
despite his serious illness had lived longer than many healthy men – finally
died, the old woman accepted her daughter’s invitation, gave away all her
chickens, packed up the Holy Scripture, the seven-armed candelabra, and her two
sets of plates, and went to live with her. She left behind the semidarkness in
which she’d been spending her life, along with a few pieces of furniture, their
feet all scraped and scratched – her husband had taken a saw to them whenever
they began to rot, shortening them by a centimeter or two – and left behind the
dirt floor that was just the same outside, her granddaughter had scratched
letters into it with a stick when she was little. Soon the thatch roof would
weigh down the now abandoned house, pressing it into the ground, and covering
it until it decomposed.
I nearly underlined the entire novel. Profound and poignant,
it’s a word-by-word fictional feast. And, in these crazy days of political
turmoil across the globe, worth exploring again what it is that makes not only
each single life worthy but the collective.
In paperback and for your favorite e-reader.
