Vectors, Vanishing Points, And Vicissitudes In The Works Of Jenny Erpenbeck

Life for Jenny Erpenbeck’s characters is a vector, a movement through time and space, in which both temporal and spatial circumstances impinge on the individual’s trajectory.

- Robert Lemon

Jenny Erpenbeck’s last three novels, Visitation (Heimsuchung, 2008), The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend, 2012), and Go, Went, Gone (Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, 2015), range so widely in terms of geography and history that at first glance it seems difficult to discern a common thematic thread. Visitation follows a single plot of lakeside land outside Berlin from the Ice Age to the post-reunification era. The End of Days presents a protagonist who lives five different lives and dies five different deaths in various locales and periods, encompassing turn-of-the-century Galicia in the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, post– World War I Vienna, Stalinist Russia, East Germany in the 1960s, and the Berlin Republic of the 1990s. While Go, Went, Gone offers a fairly sedentary protagonist and a strictly contemporary setting, here it is the world that comes to Erpenbeck’s Berlin in the form of refugees from several African countries, including Libya, Nigeria, Mali, Niger, and Ghana. And yet it is precisely this movement through time and/or space—the vectors described not only by the plots of her novels but by individual characters—that represents Erpenbeck’s central thematic interest.