Another Article on Jenny Erpenbeck

 Lauren Oyler profiles her in The New Yorker's Jenny Erpenbeck Is Keeping Time:. I am beginning to be intrigued by this writer:

Erpenbeck’s most recent novel, “Go, Went, Gone” (2017), translated by Susan Bernofsky, follows a character not unlike John Erpenbeck. In it, an uncomfortably retired East German professor, Richard, befriends a group of African refugees in contemporary Berlin, at first interviewing them, hoping to understand a situation about which he realizes he maintains a shocking ignorance, before inviting several to stay in his home. Erpenbeck approaches her material with a cool yet unrelenting curiosity. As in “The Old Child,” she grounds her story in research and experience, and she began interviewing, and then befriending, African refugees in order to write the book. (Her well-meaning efforts to help them—financially, bureaucratically—have been met, like Richard’s, with obstacle after obstacle.)

Richard and the men share a sense of dislocation, and Erpenbeck juxtaposes so many instances of “crossing over and passing under” that the text comes to resemble a musical composition, allowing the reader to feel both the passing of time and the way events can loop back on themselves, creating dissonance and resonance. (The line “crossing over and passing under” comes from a section in which Richard is teaching Osarobo, an asylum seeker from Niger, to play the piano.) But Erpenbeck also maintains a sense of proportion. If the professor’s struggles to fully adjust to the West after twenty-five years are poignant, the refugees endure similar experiences at exponentially greater magnitudes. In one passage, Richard remembers the “emotional West Berliners punctually gathered” at a new crossing point to welcome their neighbors from the East. The first time he made the crossing was to access a more convenient metro station. “Unemotional and in a hurry, he’d used his elbows to fight his way through this weeping crowd,” Erpenbeck writes. “One of the disappointed liberators shouted an insult at his back—but for the very first time, Richard got to school in under twenty minutes.”