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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin writes entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice. She has published three novels and a short story collection with Inspired Quill. Her debut, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, is rooted in her work as a clinical psychologist in a long-stay psychiatric hospital.

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20th-century lives: The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

1/2/2015

4 Comments

 
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The main character’s days end on five occasions in this unusual novel spanning the whole of the twentieth century. The first time, she’s a tiny baby, and her death radically changes the lives of her grief-stricken young parents, the father fleeing rural poverty for America, the mother turning to prostitution for the small luxuries and the human touch she craves. The final time, she’s just celebrated her ninetieth birthday in a carehome in Berlin. In between, she’s been a lovesick suicidal adolescent, a victim of Soviet purges and a lauded Eastern European writer as, in the intermezzos slotted between the five “books” addressing the five alternative versions of the woman’s life, each of her deaths are avoided, enabling her to live a little longer. Across her various lives, themes are repeated and future deaths foreshadowed, with nods towards absent fathers, Jewish persecution and women perceived as whores.


I was intrigued by the premise of this novel as both a commentary on the inevitability of death and for the overview of Eastern European history. The first death, of the young baby, was particularly moving, spelling the end, not only of a young life, but of the parents’ marriage. However, ultimately, I felt the novel made more demands on the reader than it delivered in return, providing neither sufficient cohesion across the multiple histories nor sufficiently engaging narratives within. We never learn the first name of the woman we are following, nor that of her parents and grandparents, and, although exposed to her innermost thoughts, she keeps the reader at a distance. The potentially most interesting section, when the main character has fled Nazi Germany with her husband to settle in the new Soviet Union, contains some interesting philosophising, for example (p148-9):

always the fear of giving too much of oneself or too little, Jewish sow, always the rungs separating human beings, the inferiorities, always someone pushing someone else downstairs, someone falling, knocking over the person below. Had not they, the Communists, made it their business to even out the gradient so that everyone could stand freely without falling, without pushing, shoving, being pushed or shoved, free – and without fear?

(which cleverly foreshadows the next death in the sequence, via falling downstairs) and had me thinking back to the pre-Communist era depicted in the novel, Zugzwang. Yet it did not engage me as much as I might have hoped.

This is the third novel I’ve read recently by an award-winning German-speaking writer. Although I enjoyed Daniel Kehlmann’s F, I couldn’t get to grips with Indigo by Clemens Setz, so it might be that I’m not the ideal reader for this kind of fiction. Thanks, nevertheless, to Portobello Books for my review copy of The End of Days, which was translated into English by Susan Bernofsky. If you prefer the novel of ideas to the novel of character, this might be one for you.

Somewhat tangential to this novel, albeit the subject of German translations, I came across the interesting word weltschmerz recently, literally “world pain” or the grief we feel at how the world keeps falling short of our expectations. It reminded me of Norah Colvin’s recent post introducing the word meliorism, the belief that the world can be improved by the actions of humans. Although weltschmerz might initially appear to be the polar opposite of meliorism, the article suggests a bridge between them: while the evidence suggests that our world is getting better, at least in respect of becoming less violent, “our moral norms are improving even faster, outpacing reality, so we’re constantly affronted by things we’d once have accepted”. Both are useful: weltschmerz enabling us to care enough about what’s wrong and meliorism driving us to try to do something about it.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
4 Comments
Norah Colvin link
1/2/2015 11:13:15 pm

Anne, the premise of this book, if I have understood it correctly to mean five alternate life journeys of the one person, sounds interesting. I often wonder "but what if?" I had made another choice. Sometimes life altering events don't even involve conscious choice. Certain events catapult is in certain directions without us even realising it or giving it a thought. It sounds like the book may have fallen a bit short in the way the idea was explored though and I'm not sure if there would be any real purpose for knowing alternatives if those experiencing them do not know of them, nor stand to benefit/learn from them in any way.
I was very interested to learn of the word 'weltschmerz' and the way you have linked it to meliorism. (Thank you for linking back to my post. :) ) That we are now affronted by what we once accepted is so true, and I am pleased to see that society is making progress in that way. I guess it's a seeming contradiction, that to become more tolerant, we need to become more intolerant of intolerance and injustice.

Reply
Annecdotist
3/2/2015 01:13:39 am

Glad you liked the word, Norah, as I hoped he would.
Your comment on the novel helps me to think further about what made it hard to read than I'd expected. I hope I'm not doing it an injustice by misremembering, but I think most of the alternative lives did not come about through choice, but circumstances from outside. although I was fairly critical of the novel My Real Children, I think the notion of alternative lives worked better there because of the paths diverging at a choice point rather than through chance.

Reply
Charli Mills link
3/2/2015 12:31:56 am

I had noticed the last two reviews were of translated books by German authors. This third one sounds interesting in how it is constructed, but I find that I do crave a strong narrative. Was the lack of character names intentional? As in, it could be anyone?

Great concepts: weltschmerz enabling us to care enough about what’s wrong and meliorism driving us to try to do something about it.

Reply
Annecdotist
3/2/2015 01:16:36 am

That could have been the intention, Charli, but the result for me was too much distance in, especially when the woman's lives were so different to mine.
As for the word, having felt a little under attack for not professing to be a meliorist, I was pleased to find a word/concept that gave it some kind of context.

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