Erpenbeck

Moved by a glowing review of one of them in the NYRB, moved to read two books by Jenny Erpenbach, born in East Berlin just about the time I was off to the LSE to be a lefty. The first is called 'The End of Days' and is the story of the life of someone born in the wilds of Austrian Poland around 1900 and who dies, somewhat demented, around 100 years later in a Berlin nursing home, having become on the way a famous East German writer. The daughter of a mixed marriage in the sense of those times and places. The second is called 'Visitation' and is the story of a lakeside house and its various inhabitants, with the house near enough Berlin to be used for the weekend by Berliners and the story covering very roughly the same period as that in the first book.

I found both books interesting, perhaps more on account of their subject matter - the lives and times of people from a troubled part of eastern Europe - than of the innovative, spare style. Both quite hard to follow in the sense that I found a rough sketch of the plot of the first helped me to keep my bearings and a rough sketch of the second would probably have helped. Not sure why I did not bother with this last. Rather in the way that when first reading 'War and Peace', one keeps turning back to the cast list included at the front of the better editions.

The first book was mainly very bleak, filled with the dreadful doings in eastern Europe for the first two thirds or so of the 20th century, as seen through the eyes of one minor participant - and followed by a descent into dementia of that same participant in the last third - with details that made me suspect the author of some personal knowledge of the matter. Apart from the participant, another thread running through more or less the whole book is a collected edition of Goethe (which runs to around 12 volumes in English), apparently the sort of thing a Galician shopkeeper might have run to a hundred years ago.

The second book is more sad than bleak, being more echoes from the same dreadful doings, rather than the doings themselves. One example being the rather odd status of lefty Germans returning to post-war East Germany from a war-time sojourn in what was then the Soviet Union, a sojourn which must itself have been rather odd, not to say worse. One factlet being a plague of potato plant eating beetles, which marched east across eastern Europe just before the start of the second war. A big enough plague that the roads could be carpeted with them. Wikipedia knows all about the beetles in question, but it is not clear from the article there whether this plague actually happened, or whether they happened on this scale at all.

One of the quirks of the first book is the occasional use of gmap references, the first person I have found using them, apart from myself. For example 45.61404, 70.751954, described (on page 152 in my copy) as steppe, frozen for nine months of the year, but which turns out to be in what is now Kazakhstan, a hundred miles of so east of Lake Balkhash, a large lake of fluctuating size which goes nowhere but which is well known to wikipedia too. And, a first for me, a lake not connected to the sea but which is in, in part at least, saline. A place which is hot in the summer, which lasts for about half the year, and cold in the winter. Perhaps Erpenbach just plucked places off the map without too much care. Perhaps the apparent precision of the references is little more than a gentle poke at the uses to which gmaps can be put. The other bit of content being that the place is indeed empty, as required by the story, with the illustration showing an area about 80 by 40km. Proper wilderness, not the sort of thing in 'Wild' at all (of which more in due course).

So a small wonder about how careful Erpenbeck has been with her facts, as opposed to her impressions.

Both books well served by their translator, one Susan Bernofsky. See reference 1.

PS: failed to find out if there is any connection between the Galicia of Spain and the Galicia of Poland, beyond both names being derived from 'Celt'.

Reference 1: http://www.susanbernofsky.com/. Which is frustrating in its lack of any personal details. With a name like this, how did she come to be a wow at translating from German?