Francesca Carington
No Country for Young Men
Go, Went, Gone
By Jenny Erpenbeck (Translated by Susan Bernofsky)
Portobello Books 286pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
‘We become visible’ reads a placard held by ten African refugees on hunger strike in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Jenny Erpenbeck, who won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for her last novel, The End of Days, wrote Go, Went, Gone in 2015, when the refugee crisis dominated newspaper headlines and political debate across Europe. That was the year when displaced people from war-torn northern Africa and the Middle East became visible. Two years later, however, they have started to disappear from the public mind.
This superb translation of Erpenbeck’s seventh novel into English by Susan Bernofsky feels timely, then. Richard, a newly retired professor of classical philology, becomes interested in the plight of the hunger-striking refugees when he sees them on the news as he eats his supper in front of the
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
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings
'If, as James Wolcott once claimed, Roth was a miracle of modern medicine, he was also one of therapy’s notable failures.'
@leorobsonwriter on Philip Roth, that 'walking, wanking paradox'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-great-american-novelist