a nutshell: this layered novel imagines thirty days through the lens of Senegalese painter/decorator Alphonse, who glimpses the ‘interiors’ of his clients’ often chaotic lives in the Belgian countryside (the good and the very ugly)
a line: “And I don’t believe in hell. Not after death, anyhow.”
an image: at one point Alphone recalls his mother saying that everyone he’ll meet is a child, and the nicest people are those who are aware of it
a thought: this book took me an incredibly long time to read as I kept dipping in & out, perhaps because of the sheer quantity of things that happen in it – nonetheless Alphonse was one of the most likeable characters I’ve encountered in a long time
a fact: Verbeke is a Belgian writer who writes in Dutch, and this novel was chosen as the best Dutch-language novel of 2015 by readers of a Dutch newspaper
a nutshell: beginning in 1938 and based on a true story, this novel follows a horrifying purge inflicted by Mongolia’s communist government under Soviet orders – intertwined with a complicated love story between a herdswoman and a lama
a line: “Believe me, ideas are far more powerful than guns and trucks”
an image: I was particularly moved by Davaa’s dream-state sequence as he goes to face his death – the green valley, tall meadow flowers, rainbows, his grandson, his daughter, and finally his beloved wife outside a white ger making milk-vodka
a thought: a lingering observation for me was an elderly herdswoman’s remark about the arbitrariness of borders while they were being forced to relocate after the military’s successful attack against the Japanese – the invisible lines demarcating one country from the next had been of no importance to her & her granddaughter until now
a fact: this was the first Mongolian novel to be published in the West, and the author writes that she had dreamt for years of writing the stories of her ancestors – the book ends with many pages listing those who were killed and the characters are in fact referred to by their real names
a nutshell: with diary entries from Sept 1991 to Dec 1993, this is a young girl’s deeply moving, courageous & intelligent account of what it was like to have been flung into a fight for survival under the Bosnian War as it engulfed Sarajevo
a line:“They’re drawing maps, colouring with their crayons, but I think they’re crossing out human beings, childhood and everything that’s nice and normal.”
an image: as she has grown out of her clothes, Zlata has to borrow some from the wardrobe of a friend who has fled Sarajevo; she describes standing in the girl’s empty space, surrounded by broken windows & dust, saying the room is sad and so is she
a thought: the child’s simple observations hold more clearsightedness & compassion than the ‘grown-ups’ pulling the strings of politics – she comments that among friends and family there’ve always been Serbs, Croats & Muslims, questioning why politics has meddled to create separations
a fact: Zlata’s diary has now been translated into 36 languages; at one point she writes that some people compare her with Anne Frank, which frightens her as she doesn’t want to suffer the same fate – and, thankfully, Zlata does not
a nutshell: an Israeli reporter reflects on what she saw and heard while living in Gaza, from moments of abject grief to resilient humour
a line: at one point Hass describes leaving her friends’ house in Khan Yunis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, where her friends had no running water during the day and only a limited supply of salty water at other times; she reaches the Israeli settlement of Neve Dekalim and drinks from a restroom tap – “Sweet and refreshing, the free-flowing water still had an aftertaste, the bitter flavor – I couldn’t help but imagine – of apartheid”
an image: Hass describes mangled heaps of rubble (homes demolished as a ‘deterrent’) as bearing witness to the ravaged lives of Gaza’s people like the rings of a tree trunk marking the passage of time
a thought: the chapter about the agony of obtaining exit permits for families suffering with ill-health is harrowing to read, particularly the sections on injured/unwell children in need of treatment
a fact: Hass’s desire to live in Gaza stemmed from the dread of being a bystander – a legacy of her mother’s memory of some German women looking with indifferent curiosity as she was herded from a cattle car to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in 1944; to Hass, Gaza embodies the central contradiction of the State of Israel, that is, democracy for some, dispossession for others
Navigating life inside and outside East Germany was robust training for becoming an acclaimed novelist. That’s not to say Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin in 1967, has had a one-dimensional career: from bakery sales to book binding, opera directing to writing, her CV is nothing if not eclectic. “My dad used to say it’s good if one chapter in your life is connected to the next,” she laughs over a pot of earl grey, “but in my life none is connected to any other!”
Sophie Baggott and Jenny Erpenbeck in Melbourne
Yet, on the contrary, traces of Erpenbeck’s early chapters suffuse her fiction. A sense of social angst and upheaval permeates the author’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-winning novel The End of Days, as well as her latest book: Go, Went, Gone. Depicting a (formerly East) Berliner’s interactions with African asylum seekers in the German capital, Go, Went, Gone humanises the faces behind news stories, giving space to individuals’ memories of what had to be left in their countries of origin. “It was also exploring my own society,” Erpenbeck explains. “The adventure was not so much about the Africans but German society – how they deal with the issue, what reality the refugees face, and how my reality takes on a different look in their lives.”
It’s a multifaceted approach that contrasts sharply with the blanket anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far-right AFD (Alternative für Deutschland), who reap their strongest support from Germany’s east. “Often I’m asked why East Germans are especially against newcomers,” Erpenbeck says, “When I try to make sense of it, I’d say it’s the fear of being put in another situation of instability.” Recalling the West’s reluctance to engage with East Germans in the wake of their society’s collapse, she suggests: “Now by behaving badly, so to say, they’re forcing others to listen. It’s a question of power, and wanting to provoke.”
As we touch on the abrupt loss of her childhood setting, the author shares the fears she herself held as her world changed. “I know the feeling of being afraid of not making enough money to pay rent, of being put out on the streets, of having to go somewhere your family can’t stay with you, of being divided,” she admits. “We had never spoken about money, never needed to. It came as a real shock, maybe all the more so because the joy of many in the weeks after the Fall of the Wall was so immense.”
“It’s a question of power, and wanting to provoke”
At a point when human rights lawyers are calling for EU member states to face punitive action over migrant deaths, Erpenbeck is likewise sceptical of the West’s approach to immigration. “The discussion now seems to be so short-sighted and the solutions so cruel: building a wall, or letting people drown in the Mediterranean,” she sighs. “I must say, I see some parallels between letting people drown in the Mediterranean and putting them into Auschwitz. It is a principle of selection. Some are worth allowing to survive, and others aren’t.” I ask her what answer she would give to the question that she poses in her novel: has Hitler won the war in some respects? “We will see,” she replies.
Our conversation spills well beyond the hour we set aside, meandering from the philosophical to the literary to the pragmatic. Erpenbeck pauses often before she speaks, and returns variously to the refugee crisis: “If you think in terms of ‘mankind’, it doesn’t make any sense to let even one person die.” She continues to tug at the thought, “Just imagine, as an experimental thing, it wouldn’t make any sense to let one of your companions die.” Erpenbeck maintains a quietly optimistic outlook when it comes to the future of humanity, even so. “There’s a beautiful sentence by the greatest German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin,” she says, and searches for the right words: “‘But where danger is, there arises salvation also’. This is my hope.” She looks at me, then laughs at herself.
“I know the feeling of being afraid”
Erpenbeck’s cautious positivity is perhaps an attitude dredged from her upbringing in East Germany. “If you have experienced life in two different societies, or countries, or cultural environments, then the relativity of it all comes to your mind,” she observes. “There’s hope involved. If you know there’s another world somewhere, you’re not caught in one. There are different solutions, different ideas.”
So too might her unusual life experience have exposed to her the flaws in nationalism. “I never had this idea of a nation,” she says. “Of course I love my language, I know my family, I have some friends – fortunately! This is what I know. But the idea of a nation is very strange to me.” Her curiosity about individuals, groups, dynamics is evident. “German law is very strict on who is a political refugee, and where they came from,” she comments, “But if you fall in love and marry, this border falls. Even in law, which is normally so strict about all things, love is accepted as an erosional thing that changes everything.”
And with that, Erpenbeck has also crystallised the impact of her writing in all its change-making, border-eroding, compassion-inducing powers. As we said our goodbyes, she revealed she is fifteen pages into her next novel. The focus? Ah, only time will give the answer to that one.
Want to read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (tr. Susan Bernofsky)? Visit here
TW – this review contains references to sexual assault
a nutshell: a short, narrative nonfiction book bearing witness to the suffering of undocumented children navigating the US immigration system, drawing on Luiselli’s work as a volunteer court translator in New York
a line: “It is perhaps not the American Dream they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born”
an image: the writer describes seeing child migrants enter the court system as like being stood with hands and feet tied, powerless, watching kids try to cross a busy avenue with cars speeding by
a thought: rather than writing off these children as “illegals” or “aliens” we should regard them as refugees of a hemispheric war (in which the US has long been complicit), Luiselli argues, all of whom have the right to asylum
a fact: the writer notes the horrifying reality that 80% of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the US border are raped on the journey
a nutshell: a terrifyingly necessary call to action, this collection of speeches by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (b.2003) – who sparked a global movement via school strikes – should be compulsory reading worldwide, esp. for politicians & businesses
a line: “We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.”
an image: Greta repeatedly calls for world leaders to act as if our house is on fire, that is, to respond with the level of panic that this global emergency demands and to drop the business-as-usual complacency
a thought: condemning the UK’s ongoing support for new exploitation of fossil fuels (the shale-gas fracking industry, the expansion of the North Sea oil & gas fields, the expansion of airports, the planning permission for a new coal mine), Greta predicts that this recklessness will be recalled as one of humankind’s greatest failures
a fact: scientists unanimously tell us we have just 11 years before setting off an irreversible chain reaction, way beyond human control, that will probably be the end of our civilisation as we know it – how can we not act on that knowledge?
want to read No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference? visit here
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