![]() ![]() Just as Erpenbeck does not really examine the causes of Richard’s change of heart, so she is wary of bestowing anything like easy 'redemption' on her protagonist (and hence on her novel). ![]() Perhaps the greatest barrier in the novel is set by the German population, its legal practitioners and private citizens. Erpenbeck’s novel is usefully prosaic, written in a slightly uninviting, almost managerial present tense, which keeps overt emotion at bay. Set in a city renowned for a famous wall that had once separated its citizens, it is no wonder that Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone has a lot to say about walls and barriers, both physical and abstract. Naipaul of The Enigma of Arrival, and Teju Cole’s Naipaul-influenced Open City. ![]() (Susan Bernofsky deserves immense credit for bringing this prose to us in English.) Among contemporary Anglophone writers, this classical restraint calls to mind J. Her task is comprehension rather than replication, and she uses a measured, lyrically austere prose, whose even tread barely betrays the considerable passion that drives it onward. Jenny Erpenbeck’s magnificent novel Go, Went, Gone is about 'the central moral question of our time,' and among its many virtues is that it is not only alive to the suffering of people who are very different from us but alive to the false consolations of telling 'moving' stories about people who are very different from us. ![]()
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