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In Visitation the uprooting of an ailing fir tree reveals a case full of porcelain buried by an architect before he fled to West Berlin. In The End of Days a Jewish family’s looted heirlooms turn up in a Viennese antique shop, where a tourist inspects, but doesn’t buy, the multi-volume edition of Goethe that his great-grandmother lugged from place to place until she was put on a transport in 1941. Visitation, which looks at Germany through the 20th century via the history of a lakeside house near Berlin, and The End of Days, which does the same by means of five different versions of one woman’s life, both arrive at some of their most piercing moments by tracking particular objects. In Erpenbeck’s fiction, great swathes of detail serve a similar function.
‘Open Bookkeeping’, a piece about her mother’s death in 2008, rehearses the technique in miniature, itemising the tasks the death imposed on her – paying a bill for €1.42 disposing of household goods ordering and putting up a gravestone working out what to do with her mother’s flat – before ending, after the flat has been rented out a year later: ‘Now I’d like to call my mother.’ It’s a useful introduction to a body of work in which what isn’t being said, or isn’t being said in the expected way, can be as significant as what is. It contains memoir, pieces on writers Anglophone editors might have heard of (Hans Fallada, Thomas Mann, Walter Kempowski, Ovid) and two forays into social criticism.
The English edition, translated by Kurt Beals, is less than half the length of the original. Not a Novel is a selection of Erpenbeck’s occasional writings from 1999 to 2018. Die Welt’s review appeared on 31 August, the day Angela Merkel – who, like Erpenbeck, grew up in the German Democratic Republic – upended national policy with the words ‘Wir schaffen das’: ‘We can do this.’ The border opened four days later. In 2015 her novel Go Went Gone, which deals with the refugee crisis, was published at the height of the debate in Germany about asylum seekers arriving from Syria. Visitation (2008) and The End of Days (2012) did well outside Germany, and the acceptance speeches for literary prizes reproduced in Not a Novel – there are many more in the German version – testify to her unlooked for stardom. In time, writing took over from opera directing. The book sat in a drawer for three years and ‘it was only belatedly, and via various detours, that my manuscript made its way to the Eichborn publishing house, and suddenly they decided that it was already finished as it was, that is, they accepted it and printed it.’
She had no sense of being in a race for literary fame. Then she landed a job at the opera house in Graz. She wrote because she had always liked to write, because a new laptop made it easier and because ‘I wasn’t used to having nothing to do with my brain.’ With grown-up discipline she wrote a story ‘about a woman who doesn’t want to grow up’. The germ was a news story she remembered from adolescence, a case of an adult impersonating a schoolchild, and her account of her motivation is matter of fact. She was 27, had studied opera directing and was working in a bakery in her native Berlin when she started writing what would become The Old Child (1999).
‘I didn’t write the book because I wanted to become a writer,’ Jenny Erpenbeck says of her first novel – a novella really – in one of the pieces collected in Not a Novel.
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