David Winters
Death Comes at the Beginning
The End of Days
By Jenny Erpenbeck (Translated by Susan Bernofsky)
Portobello Books 238pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
The End of Days, the new novel by German writer and opera director Jenny Erpenbeck, starts at the turn of the 20th century, with the accidental death of an eight-month-old Jewish girl in Galicia. Traumatised by this loss, her father flees to America and her abandoned mother becomes a prostitute. At this point, Erpenbeck pauses the passage of time. What would have happened, she asks, if the child had lived? The rest of the novel is split into sections, each playing out a possible future. In one, the girl grows into a lovesick youth in Red Vienna; in another, a young wife in Stalin’s Moscow. Next she’s a middle-aged author in East Berlin; then an elderly lady in a nursing home. In each case, of course, death catches up. The teenager dies in a suicide pact; the wife falls foul of the Great Purge. A slip on the stairs claims the author; only the old lady dies a natural death. Between these episodes, Erpenbeck inserts brief intermezzi, in which she adjusts a few crucial conditions, letting her character live a bit longer. However, whatever the course of her life, ‘some death or other will eventually be her death’.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency