characters Û PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ☆ Jenny Erpenbeck

Aller Tage Abend review » 100 Ant geschreven zeer ontroerende roman voert de lezer mee naar Wenen tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog Moskou aan de vooravond van de Tweede Wereldoorlog en Berlijn vóór en na de val van de Muur Een diepgravende reflectie over leven dood en de rol van het toev The first two sections of this novel took my breath away I slowed my pace down to a close reading level absorbing the resonances between the first two possible lives of this girl child and entertaining the possibilities in subtle shifts that might change a life I immediately found it profound than Kate Atkinson s Life After Life which starts at a galloping pace and a very different style An infant who suffers a crib death finds herself with suicidal ideations in another life Does he know what a burden she is finding life which from inside always looked to her like a sphere with perfectly smooth black walls and you keep running and running and there isn t even a shabby little door to let you outI cleared my Sunday evening it was just me and the cat to read the second half the three seuential possible lives of the character that take up near where the previous ended The what might have happened if this was different or if one tiny change was made I felt challenged as a reader to enter the later lives as deeply as I had the early lives I was still absorbing the impact of the first 100 pages I wished for the Books to be longer so that I could spend time with her in each new setting In Book III the character turns to Communism and this section was distancing and elliptical fragmented cold I realize that the style was a reflection of the rhetoric of the comrades so it was deliberate In Book IV our character s son is a central figure recounting his and his mother s life simultaneously with her death as she falls down the stairs if only she d stepped differently if only if only By Book V she is an old woman I had some trouble fully imagining her in a retirement home These are minor complaints and probably my failure as a reader and not legitimate problems with the book The return of the Goethe volumes and the resonances from all the possible lives moved me I had been listening to the audio of Moorehead s tragic Holocaust history A Train in Winter in the days leading up to reading this and the horrors of death camps and the human struggle against meaningless evil were informing my reading of Erpenbeck The twentieth century itself the century of thanatos and Germany are backdrops essential influences and I felt invited to apply the If only uestions to the great wars and deaths of the century

Aller Tage Abend review » 100 In Galicië sterft aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw de baby van een joodse moeder en een katholieke vader Onontkoombaar noodlot of gruwelijk toeval Had bijvoorbeeld de moeder of de vader ’s nachts het raam opengerukt een handvol sneeuw van de vensterba I have read 50% of this book and I am no further on than when I had 1% read as this book is making absolutely no sense to me When is the right time to give up on a book I hate giving up on a novel but I am getting zero satisfaction from this story and frustration is starting to set in So I think now is the time to part company with this one One of the difficulties for me is that neither the main character or her parents sister husband grandparents and great grandparents are given names in the 50% that I read I found this made the story or stories uite difficult to follow as was the 5 versions of the life and death of the protagonist I was reading this on holiday and thought AAAhhhhhhh enough is enough

characters Û PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook ☆ Jenny Erpenbeck

Aller Tage Abend review » 100 Nk gegrist en onder het hemd van het kind gestopt dan was het meisje misschien opeens weer gaan ademen Hoe zou haar leven dan zijn verlopen Jenny Erpenbeck schetst in Een handvol sneeuw vijf mogelijke levens van dit naamloze kind haar hoofdpersoon Deze brilj A child dies But this is not the end no the beginning What if she hadn t died What if her life went on and she died in the despair of unreuited love or in a senseless pogrom of Trotskyite elements or celebrated at the height of literary fame or in obscurity forgotten and alone in an old people s home What does it take to survive the twentieth century To be tossed on the waves of two wars the Spanish flu economic collapse totalitarian regimes the fall of communism and yet keep bobbing up to the surface How do you cheat death waiting just outside the window A lump of snow a patch of ice different clothes a party functionary who remembers your apple strudel the right foot instead of the left on the stairs Life as contingent death as a freak the step between the two worlds no than a breath Unless you are the old great grandfather for whom dying is like crossing a vast room whose far side is not visibleThis is a boldly conceived story and magnificently executed Jenny Erpenbeck s sixth book is about the contingency of life and mid Europe from 1902 to 1992 That might sound a little hard to take great unpalatable lumps of philosophy and history but although she offers us here five possible biographies she never lets her gaze wander from the human individual the human cost the human pain Her tone is uiet fatalistic melancholy the five sections vary in pace and perspective Erpenbeck seems to have a marked distaste for handing out names the child in The Old Child and Other Stories never has one at all and most of the people in Visitation are referred to in their role the gardener the architect the architect s wife Here the women are mother grandmother That works fine as long as there are no than three generations Here there are four Tiny uibble It keeps you on your toes