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The Old Child & Other Stories, by Susan Bernofsky Jenny Erpenbeck
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From Publishers Weekly
This enigmatic collection by East Berlin–born Erpenbeck explores entwined personal and political histories through the literal loss of memory. In the title story, a 75-page novella, an adolescent-looking female amnesiac is taken off the streets and into a Dresden home for children. As the story unfolds, there are signs that the girl, a metaphorical East Germany, may not be so young after all, and that her attempts to freeze herself in time, and to forget, are failing. In the exquisitely moving "Sand," a girl watches as her aging grandmother becomes frail and strange, inhabited by youthful laughter that, the girl realizes, "must be her own laughter that has returned to her like a lost daughter." "Hale and Hearty" tells the story of Maria Kainbacher, who looks up a friend from 50 years before and, by voicing their shared experiences, jolts Gertrud into vivid recollections (which Erpenbeck then wrenches to a tritely abrupt conclusion). Dark and cryptic, the stories are too diffuse in their language and plot to approach the Grimm-like precision they seem to aim for, but they provide a window into a post-1989 European political unconscious that continues to take shape. (Oct. 28) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Review
“Erpenbeck's writing is so concentrated, so dense, that a slim volume of stories packs the weight of the world.†- Ira Panic“Oppressive, charming, scary: every story has its own mood. Intelligently constructed, thought-provoking, full of the cunning of writerly finesse.†- Cosmopolitan
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Product details
Series: New Directions Paperbook
Paperback: 125 pages
Publisher: New Directions (September 27, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780811216081
ISBN-13: 978-0811216081
ASIN: 081121608X
Product Dimensions:
5.3 x 0.4 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
5 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,262,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
About a year ago I read my first work by Jenny Erpenbeck, her short novel "Visitation". I was highly impressed -- enough so that I resolved to read other fiction of hers in translation. I started at the beginning -- which is THE OLD CHILD & OTHER STORIES.Published in 1999, "Gesichte vom alten Kind" ("History of the Old Child" in English) was Erpenbeck's first published prose fiction. It is an arresting, rather bewildering novella about a fourteen-year-old girl who is found standing in a Dresden street with an empty bucket in one hand. She doesn't know or remember her name or anything else about herself except that she is fourteen. She is placed in the Home for Children, where she willingly obeys authority but shows very little initiative. Very slowly she awkwardly accommodates herself to the academic and social life of the eighth grade . . . until an event commemorating the anniversary of the fire-bombing of Dresden. It leaves her badly shaken and confused: "Why is there a birthday party when the people were boiled alive?" The girl (Erpenbeck never gives her a name) then begins a downhill slide into an illness that puts her in a bed in the Municipal Hospital and suddenly ages her such that she resembles a woman of thirty. The authorities find her mother and bring the old lady to the hospital. "Oh, are you my mother? says the woman who used to be the girl, and very slowly she opens her eyes. I don't remember you at all.""History of the Old Child" certainly seems to be an allegory, but my attempts to make sense of it are pretty feeble. Does it have something to do with life in East Germany (the part of divided Germany in which Dresden was located and the nation of Erpenbeck's birth)? Does it somehow have something to do with Oscar Matzerath, the deranged boy drummer of Günter Grass's "The Tin Drum", who also did not want to grow up? The novella is rich in potential allusions, but many of them confound me completely. (For example, when the girl tries repeating a quip of one of her classmates and is utterly ignored, "she glances down at herself and, sure enough, there is the sentence she has stolen from her classmate poking out of her side.") Erpenbeck's prose is stark and laconic and noteworthy. But in the end "History of the Old Child" does not engage me. No doubt that is due in part to the fact that for me it was so elusive -- but then I also am mystified by much of Kafka, yet rarely does he fail to engage me.The "other stories" in this volume are from Erpenbeck's second publication, a collection of short stories that appeared in 2001. They range from four to thirteen pages in length. Two of them -- "Sand" and "Hale and Hallowed" -- are superb; they also are more conventional, less allegorical, than the other pieces in this volume. Those two stories alone would have alerted me that Jenny Erpenbeck is a writer to keep an eye out for. All six pieces, by the way, present legacies of one sort or another (I think).
Jenny Erpenbeck's first book to be published in English consists of the title novella plus five short stories. Only one of these is at all conventional, but that is a beauty. Entitled "Hale and Hallowed," after a New Year's custom practised by German children, it is about an old woman visiting a contemporary whom she last saw in a maternity ward fifty years ago, when they were both giving birth to sons. The friend has suffered a stroke, and at first remembers nothing. But as her visitor persists, a miracle begins: "Gertrud can now remember the young face of the old woman who has appeared before her, and she realizes that an entire piece of her lifetime which she herself had so thoroughly forgotten that she was not even able to regret forgetting it has been preserved inside this woman like a cake in a cool, dark pantry." Gradually, everything begins to come back in full detail, Gertrud's gain mirroring her visitor's loss.Most of these stories appear to be about time in one way or another. A young girl sees her actress grandmother slip into dementia, accompanied by the echoes of her old poetic voices. A female prisoner-of-war returns from Siberia, filled with an energy and determination that contrasts with her husband's degeneration. In the final story, the narrator sees "the phases of my life sitting in a circle around Death," living through childhood, an affair, exile, maturity, and old age in five brief almost abstract sections. This seems to refer back to several other stories in the book, including the strangest of all, a collage of psychosexual images entitled "The Sun-Flecked Shadows of my Skull," perhaps the surreal deconstruction of an affair, perhaps code for something else entirely.The sense of some other meaning behind the apparent surface is strongest in the title novella, "The Story of the Old Child." An unnamed 14-year-old girl is found in the street, carrying an empty bucket. Unable to answer for herself, she is placed in an orphanage, where she willingly accepts her place at the very bottom of the childhood hierarchy, too dull to succeed in class, too heavy to be any good at games, the butt of cruel jokes, but pathetically eager and loyal. She looks older than her years to begin with, and time that seems to have stopped for her mind accelerates for her body, so that by the novella's surprising climax she is virtually a mature woman. The story has a horrible fascination on its surface level, familiar to anyone who has known bullying at school, and written with a remarkable empathy. But I suspect it may also be a parable for something else, perhaps the East German people under Communism; I don't know enough at first hand to be sure. This would certainly be in keeping with Erpenbeck's nightmare novella THE BOOK OF WORDS (2004). And certainly her magnificent recent novel VISITATION, much more lucid and less dark than these earlier explorations, where the passage of time and political power is indeed the main subject.
Wonderful writer. Amazing imagination.
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