The End of Days

Author(s): Jenny Erpenbeck

Novel | Translated fiction | Western Europe | Historical | Read our reviews!

From one of the most daring voices in European fiction, this is a story of the twentieth century traced through the various possible lives of one woman. She is a baby who barely suffocates in the cradle. Or perhaps not? She lives to become as an adult and dies beloved. Or dies betrayed. Or perhaps not? Her memory is honoured. Or she is forgotten by everyone. Moving from a small Galician town at the turn of the century, through pre-war Vienna and Stalin's Moscow to present-day Berlin, Jenny Erpenbeck homes in on the moments when life follows a particular branch and 'fate' suddenly emerges from the sly interplay between history, character and pure chance. The End of Days is a novel that pulls apart the threads of destiny and allows us to see the present and the past anew.

Erpenbeck's Visitation told the history of twentieth century Germany as it touched upon one location; this book takes the various possibilities of one life to tell a similar story. There are five 'lives' for the main character, who variously dies soon after her birth, survives to die in pre-WWII Vienna, post-war Moscow and post-unification Berlin. Erpenbeck shows that our so-called 'fate' is to be tossed back and forth between chance and the impersonal forces of history until we fall into the ground ("some death or other will eventually be her death"). In the earlier sections particularly, Erpenbeck's writing is astoundingly evocative and nuanced, balancing vast emotional weights on delicate, precisely placed observations. Such good writing, distilling the incomprehensibly large in the affectingly small, is a pleasure to read. 


{THOMAS}


 


Product Information

A story of the twentieth century told through the various lives of one woman: an intoxicating masterpiece of a novel that kneads Time and History like dough

Winner of Hans Fallada-Preis 2013.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-Winner 2015.

 

JENNY ERPENBECK is the author of Visitation (2010) and The Old Child & The Book of Words (2008), both published by Portobello. Her fiction is published in fourteen languages. SUSAN BERNOFSKY has translated works by Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, Yoko Tawada, Ludwig Harig and Franz Kafka. She is the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe and is currently at work on a biography of Robert Walser. Her translation of The Old Child and Other Stories was awarded the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.

General Fields

  • : 9781846275159
  • : Portobello Books
  • : Portobello Books Ltd
  • : 0.186
  • : May 2015
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : June 2015
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Jenny Erpenbeck
  • : Paperback
  • : 1507
  • : English
  • : 833.92
  • : 192
  • : FA