Jenny Erpenbeck

Susan Bernofsky

Presents a unique view of modern German history in a novel relating five different stories of the possible lives and deaths at varying stages of maturity experienced by a single character.

The End of Days

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated novel of 2014, now a New Directions paperback

Brianna Hawkins

Laura

The End of Days is a novel I really, really wanted to like. It seemed smart and interesting and history-filled and just right up my alley as a whole, and I was excited to dive in.

The biggest problem The End of Days has is that the main character does not have a name. I do not have a problem with nameless main characters, in fact I usually end up liking stories with that trope, like The Road or most of Truman Capote's short stories. But in those books, it works because of either how few characters there are, or how little importance the narrator is to the story. In The Road, the man and his son are, for the most part, the only characters, so there's no risk of confusing them. In Breakfast at Tiffany's, the narrator is both unimportant to the story and also speaking in the first person, so his name never has any reason to come up. But in this, it is third person, there's a million characters, and many of them are women. For more than three quarters of this novel, I had no idea as to who was talking at any given moment, and the only character I could actually keep straight in my head was Sasha, because he had a name. The third book was what completely lost me; I don't even think the translator had any idea as to what in the hell was going on during that scene.

The writing was also very repetitive and not all that great, and it did have a very distinctive translated feel to it, though I can't help but feel a little bad for the translator. If some scenes in this novel are half as confusing as they are in German, then she had her work cut out for her. I can tell that Erpenbeck was trying to go for a minimalist, Scandinavian style, as seen in books like Wolf Winter, but it doesn't really work because, again, of the constant and annoying repetition, which ruins actually quite good scenes, like in the first book, after the mother has lost her baby girl, and something along the same lines as this sentence pops up "...back when the girl was still a mother..." This is a poignant remark when it first appears, but it is repeated so many times through the story and is tailored to so many other characters it loses its poignancy and becomes grating instead.

That being said, I do love the idea of this novel. I love the idea of travelling a girl through time, through her many deaths, but the confusingness of the novel makes it hard to follow and even harder to like. And yet, despite my many complaints about the writing, I still want to read Visitation, because I love the idea behind that novel, too. I think I just really, really want to like this author even though this book is a complete miss.

The End of Days

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