Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck’s highly acclaimed novel Go, Went, Gone was a New York Times notable book and launched one of Germany’s most admired writers into the American spotlight. In the New Yorker, James Wood wrote: “When Erpenbeck wins the Nobel Prize in a few years, I suspect that this novel will be cited.”

On the heels of this literary breakthrough comes a book of personal, profound, often humorous meditations and reflections. Erpenbeck writes, "With this collection of texts, I am looking back for the first time at many years of my life, at the thoughts that filled my life from day to day."

Starting with her childhood days in East Berlin ("I start with my life as a schoolgirl … my own conscious life begins at the same time as the socialist life of Leipziger Strasse"), Not a Novel provides a glimpse of growing up in the GDR and of what it was like to be twenty-two when the wall collapsed; it takes us through Erpenbeck’s early adult years, working in a bakery after immersing herself in the worlds of music, theater, and opera, and ultimately discovering her path as a writer.

There are lively essays about her literary influences (Thomas Bernhard, the Brothers Grimm, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), unforgettable reflections on the forces at work in her novels (including history, silence, and time), and scathing commentaries on the dire situation of America and Europe today. "Why do we still hear laments for the Germans who died attempting to flee over the wall, but almost none for the countless refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, turning the sea into a giant grave?"

With deep insight and warm intelligence, Jenny Erpenbeck provides us with a collection of unforgettable essays that take us into the heart and mind of "one of the finest and most exciting writers alive" (Michel Faber).

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Germany, Biography, German Literature, Writing

198 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 24, 2018

About the author

Jenny Erpenbeck (born 12 March 1967 in East Berlin) is a German director and writer.

Jenny Erpenbeck is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, where she graduated in 1985. She then completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters as props and wardrobe supervisor.

From 1988 to 1990 Erpenbeck studied theatre at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1990 she changed her studies to Music Theater Director (studying with, among others, Ruth Berghaus, Heiner Müller and Peter Konwitschny) at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory. After the successful completion of her studies in 1994 (with a production of Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles, she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's Erwartung, Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and a world premiere of her own piece Cats Have Seven Lives. As a freelance director, she directed in 1998 different opera houses in Germany and Austria, including Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Aachen, Acis and Galatea at the Berlin State Opera and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zaide in Nuremberg/Erlangen.

In the 1990s Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She is author of narrative prose and plays: in 1999, History of the Old Child, her debut; in 2001, her collection of stories Trinkets; in 2004, the novella Dictionary; and in February 2008, the novel Visitation. In March 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her son, born 2002.

Reviews

[Nat K · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How did I become who I am?"

A chance scroll on Instagram led me to this book. Kismet. I can't say I recall having heard of Jenny Erpenbeck before. But what an absolute delight to "discover" her. I got lost in the words, and the array of thoughts. I was totally immersed in the pages once I started.

I don't know where to begin with this.
Part bio, part memoir, part reflections, memories and lots of pondering. It's quite unique and has hit a spot in my psyche I didn't know was waiting to be filled.

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin, in the GDR (German Democratic Republic aka East Germany).The place of spy novels, Checkpoint Charlie and the Stasi. But for her it was a place filled with ordinary people getting on with everyday lives.

The Berlin Wall fell in late 1989, reuniting a city that had been divided for over 30 years. Unifying a country that had been split for too long. And effectively erasing the only life she knew.

"Seen from the outside, our every day life under socialism might have seemed exotic, but we weren't a wonder or horror to ourselves, we were the everyday world, and in that everday world we were among ourselves."

This is collection of essays is about all manner of topics, from growing up in the GDR, her literary influences, what motivates her to write, the power of music and what defines us both as individuals and as a society.

As she so rightly surmises, she knew no other life. Her childhood was no more unusual than anyone else's. It simply was. From her bedroom window at night, she would "...watch the soldiers on patrol." as her street was so near to the wall. But this to her was like any other view.

A scene I found incongruous was the rush of people - "tourists" - from the West of Berlin once the wall was destroyed, clambering to see the East side of the city, like it was some strange zoo. It was both surreal and unsettling.

I loved her thoughts about "space" and "time". How intrinsic they are and how much room they take up in us.

"...the present belongs to us for precisely 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past. That means that every 3 seconds, we produce ourselves as strangers."

Her sadness at seeing her old primary school demolished. Her memories of the rooms, hallways and staircases. How they remain in her mind as being part of her life.

"What actually happens to the curvature of space-time when a wall collapses, when the ceiling crashes to the floor?"

Ms. Erpenbeck has a bit of an obsession imagining the lives and events that occurred in buildings where only a facade now remains. Or of sitting on a bus, where she likes to imagine what the passenger sitting across from her will look like at eighty. How time and life will cause an inevitable ruin. It's all very esoteric and beautifully done.

"Time also separates us from what's coming..."

The chapter on the grief and numbness at losing her Mum was quietly gut wrenching. The utter inertia she felt, there's no other way to describe it. Admin matters, closing bank accounts and packing up her Mum's apartment. Lists. Pages and pages of lists of items that her Mum owned which were now hers, decisions to be made about what to do with them. The weight of an inheritance. Still having to go through the motions of everyday life. People asking at six months, at seven months, at one year "Are you writing anything new yet?"

The pull of music. "Music is made of waves that touch our flesh..." Listening to it when happy. Listening to it when sad. Classical. The beauty of a choir singing. Operatic arias. Music defining moments.

"I get lost in it, that must be why the Doors are called the Doors, there are always these doors through music, doors that pull me into the world beyond the world, into the moving air, until I get dizzy, Jim Morrison..."

There are so many more pivotal moments in this collection.

For me, these essays are undefinable. It was like being offered a glimpse into someone else's soul.

They have a dreamlike quality, yet are steeped in reality. This is intelligent, thoughtful writing. What luck I stumbled upon this collection. I have her novels to look forward to now. I can only imagine what they'll be like.

"Our reflections on the ways we see, hear, and read, and our interest in the perceptions of others, are, I hope, a foreshadowing of a world in which difference is a topic of discussion, but not a reason to kill anyone."

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some time now, Jenny Erpenbeck (° 1967) is one of the better German writers. Her novels are not always easy to read, but they are always worth it. This is a non-fiction book, with a collection of lectures she gave on various themes. To begin with, the struggle with her East German past: like no other, Erpenbeck puts into words how traumatic the sudden disappearance of the GDR was, as if part of her own identity was cut off, and how derogatory the attitude of many Westerners still is about that past. She links this, as in her beautiful novel Go, Went, Gone, to how disruptive the life of illegal refugees in today's Germany must be. And she immediately opens that up to how life can fundamentally change for each of us from one moment to the next, and how that affects our own identity: “We know that transformations lie before us, we know that transformations lie behind us, and we know, according to scientific findings, that the present belongs to us for precisely 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past. That means that every 3 seconds, we produce ourselves again as strangers. What should I say, then, when I’m asked to say who I am?” No wonder Ovid's Metamorphoses are her most beloved book.

The most clever contributions in this book are about language, literature, and especially the act of writing. In very thoughtful, slowly digging circular movements, Erpenbeck exposes what a phenomenally given language is, and how literature both creates reality and exposes the unfathomability of that reality: “Literature tells us that what we know is never the whole truth, but literature also tells us that the whole truth is waiting for us, if only we could read. And with that, it begins to teach us to read, even if that lesson requires more time to learn than we have in our own lifetimes. It also teaches us — and here I include myself as a writer — that the truth never ends where we want it to end.” For Erpenbeck, the pinnacle of literature can be found on stage, where an inimitable play takes place between actions, words and silences, which can only be compared to music: “And so in silence, in every silence that is not dead and empty, but rather filled to the brim with what is truly essential, literature and music meet. Both literature and music are closely connected to this silence, in their essence they are nothing but interpretations of this silence, at least insofar as they aim to arrive at something like truth. And both music and literature — which creates sounds in our minds, even when we are reading silently — have the privilege that they can take those things that cannot or will not be spoken of directly, and make them audible in other ways.” This book is chock full of reflections that testify to a very alert, empathic mind. Highly recommended. Rating 3.5 stars.

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really really enjoyed the one fictional work that I've read by this author, and especially admired the dry, dispassionate way she described some awful events from history. By stepping back and simply presenting the facts, the reader is allowed to provide the judgements of these events themselves. In addition to the tone, there were some well-planned writing strategies, certain well-timed bits of repetition, that were done exceptionally well.

I don't find this approach as effective in a memoir. This suffers in comparison to, for instance, Megan Stielstra's heart-on-her-sleeve approach to writing, which sucks the reader into her orbit from the first page and makes you an ally rather than an observer. And honestly, this isn't even a memoir -- it's simply a collection of essays, speeches and lectures written by the author, loosely bound together with the theme of "the country I grew up in (East Germany) doesn't exist anymore." In her novel, certain sentences were repeated verbatim in a thoughtful and strategic way. In this book, we read at least three times about the way her mother washed dishes, not because it was particularly interesting but simply because she saw fit to mention it in three distinct speeches.

It's quite apparent that she spends much of her time inside her own head -- an attractive quality for a novelist. But actually watching somebody thinking, and committing these thoughts to paper as they're thinking them, is not so fun. I still want to read more of her fiction, though.

[Fionnuala]

Alongside some beautiful pieces of memoir writing, Jenny Erpenbeck's Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces includes speeches she gave at award ceremonies and to college students, a keynote speech at a conference, an introduction to a novel, plus an obituary.

She writes well, and often about her books and her writing so there's a lot here for the reader to appreciate. Following her thoughts is remarkably easy too as her style is simple and clearcut.

But there was a bit of repetition in this collection as she inevitably shared similar thoughts about her approach to writing with the different groups she addressed. Editors should have caught that, I feel, and dropped some of the 23 pieces instead of lazily lumping them all in together. But that's a minor complaint in a collection that gave me much pleasure.

[madison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of writing I live for! By the time I finished the first few essays, I knew this would end up being one of my favorite books published in 2020. When I was about a third of the way through, I decided to pre-order several copies to give to friends. I've NEVER done that before, but I love this book THAT much.

"Why does a person want to write? I think we want to write because we find it hard to make ourselves understood. Because we find that things fall by the wayside when we speak. In fact, as strange as it sounds, the most important reason that we write is probably that we are at a loss for words."

This collection is a super quick read. It covers topics such as memory, rebirth, death, borders, the Berlin Wall, what it's like to mourn and grieve lost people, lost places, and lost time, the writing process, politics.

The writing is matter of fact, witty, sometimes somber, but that may just be because it is so honest. I was really drawn to the essays that touch on how memory can be held in physical spaces, destroyed buildings, or inherited belongings and objects. Erpenbeck's writing on grieving the settings that provided a backdrop to our past lives and experiences (like in childhood) absolutely slayed me. There are also texts provided of Erpenbeck's lectures on writing and storytelling that I want everyone who writes stories or plays to read. They're incredible.

THE WISDOM THE POWER the beauty contained in this small collection. Agh. Clearly words fail me. If you're looking for somethin' profound, somethin' to sit in your gut, something that makes you feel connected to all of humanity, this is for you. Gave me Deborah Levy wisdom vibes. I wish Jenny Erpenbeck was my friend. My heart is full.

Thank you to #NetGalley and New Directions for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Growth, as we read in Ovid, is a transformation, but not a forward movement.

This likely wasn't an ideal starting point for my reading of Jenny Erpenbeck. It is both personal and muted, perhaps self-conscious. Perhaps my vision was blurred? Perhaps there was excessive baggage I brought as a reader?

The opening memoir pieces recount a Berlin childhood, offering an unspoken allusion to that of Walter Benjamin. yet is this presumed to be a tragedy? Such depends on your idea of life in East Berlin. What is fascination is how Erpenbeck employs the idea of dead end street and how such offered safety as a child, a bare minimum of traffic allows children to frolic on the asphalt. the street terminates in the Wall. This theme is returned to at the book's end, when attention is paid to the refugee crisis. Suddenly after decades, crossing borders is topical in European circles, yet it isn't dead-end or one-way streets that are the prominent theme but rather blind spots. How we Westerners remain self-indulgent, knowingly oblivious to global suffering, and how we wish for a reprieve that the human suffering of refugees and the homeless inflict on particular burdens. I found these ideas compelling but the prose of author. I remain at a terrible loss as to why? The middle section largely culled from Award Lectures relates to literature and her time at a bakery and as an opera director. That felt the most distant.

[Penelope · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book partly because I had so enjoyed reading the author's book, Visitation. The 'Pieces' were for the most part really enjoyable and I was fascinated to read about her life in East Berlin before the wall came down and then the subsequent changes to her life. I look forward to reading more of her work.

[Becca Younk · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, which is part memoir, part essay collection, Jenny Erpenbeck explores what it means to grow up in a country that no longer exists. She uses literature, her own and others, to examine the world we live in. What does it mean to have memories of a place that only exists in history? Erpenbeck shines most when she's recounting childhood experiences growing up in East Berlin. And because it is an Erpenbeck book, the essays all tie into what borders and immigration is doing to society. Why do we celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall but still believe in strict immigration laws? The fact is, is that we have decided some immigrants are good and others are bad, and Erpenbeck beautifully writes about how this is the exact wrong thing to do and how it has led to tragedy, over and over. I loved reading about what it was like for her to grow up in the GDR, She doesn't leave out the negative aspects while also leaving the reader with an understanding that her childhood was wonderful in many ways. Erpenbeck's style is concise while also being very witty and smart.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing a copy for review!

[Fran Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find Jenny Erpenbeck one of the finest writers of our time. Beautiful, so intellligent and thought provoking, her images and thinking fires something inside me so deep and true about life. She addresses the little details that build upon one another and transform our experiences continually and is acutely attuned to the social inequities that people suffer. I think she's stunning.

[Anastasiia Mozghova · Rating 3 out of 5]

some random discoveries are more successful than others. somehow, i enjoyed this book much less than i had thought i would despite the subjects that i'm interested in and a great writing style.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can greatly admire a book and be compelled by it, and also think that it isn't really what its title says that it is. This is only a little bit of a memoir, and much more a view into how Erpenbeck works as a writer, via her essays and the speeches she's given accepting various literary awards, including her focus on immigration, the concept of actual and perceived borders, of land and body. Divided into three sections: Life; Literature and Music; and Society, we learn that fairy tales are a touchstone for her, and her literary models include Hesse, Mann, and Edgar Lee Masters; about the silence between words, the similarity between music and musicality in prose. We also learn a bit about her childhood growing up in East Germany, when the wall was still up, and how it felt to her when it suddenly came down. I would have liked much more of that. Kirkus Reviews says Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces is an ideal introduction to Erpenbeck's life and work, but I'm glad that I first read her novels. I think her novels are the place to start, and then this work brings things perhaps missed to the fore.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the autobiographical pieces about Erpenbeck's family and her childhood spent growing up in East Germany (honestly would have been fine if the whole book had been made up of that tbh) but struggled a bit with the essays on literature - just not really my thing and hard to appreciate if you've not read the authors being dissected. Great writing, and this has made me keen to check out her fiction, though - I think I'll start with The End of Days.

[Bagus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny Erpenbeck’s first nonfiction book has a mocking tone in its title, Kein Roman “Not A Novel”. In the past, she was often asked by people about what topic in the next book she is writing about, and it has been repeated consistently. So when the time comes when she finally writes something different, this time the title is really self-evident, Kein Roman. In a really intimate tone, Erpenbeck shares many of her thoughts and reflections in a collection of writings between 1992 and 2018, which reveals many of her influences as well as her views on contemporary society.

In Visitation, Erpenbeck explores the concept of Heimat, a German word that has no equivalent in English, which roughly translates into “Home(land)”. The main character is really bizarre, not a person, but a house by a summer lake located southeast of Berlin in the state of Brandenburg. The house has witnessed three families, five generations of people lived inside itself through the span of time in the twentieth century, from the Weimar Republic in the 1920s to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic. The proprietors of the house keep changing, with only the Gardener who remains throughout the story, who is simply there without questioning anything, just like Mother Nature that keeps watching us from afar. The search for a home is a never-ending journey for humans throughout history.

The next novel of Erpenbeck that I have read, The End of Days, explores numerous nameless individuals as well and also chronicling the story of a woman who has died several times throughout the twentieth century and led different lives in each alternate universe where she did not die. At the turn of the century, a female baby has just died in a town in Galicia, at that time a constituent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What would the baby do if she did not die? Does a day on which a life comes to an end is still far from the end of days? In this story, Erpenbeck explores the unique perspective of the multiple roles that a person could hold, in the case that she did not die. She could be a daughter, a mother, an activist of the Communist Party in both Austria and Moscow, a widow whose husband was arrested during Stalin’s Great Purge, and many more infinite possibilities.

And in her critically-acclaimed Go, Went, Gone, Erpenbeck took on the task of putting into the plate the European refugee crisis which deserves more attention similar to her own experience of living in a different country after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Marienfelde district in West Berlin used to bear witness to many East Germans committing Republikflucht before the Wall finally sealed the way out for the East Germans after 1961. After the fall of the Wall, many West Berliners greeted their eastern neighbours with smiles, and even West Germany embraced their new citizens with the “welcome money” of 100 Deutschemark following the German reunification. Yet the refugees from Africa and the Middle East do not experience similar reception in Germany. Many people condemned the Berlin Wall and mourned its victims during the 28 years of its existence, yet few voices condemn the way many boats drowned in the Mediterranean, and there’s this uneasiness about the differences of the treatment to similar displacement which significance was diminuted due to geopolitical reasons. Where can a person go where he doesn’t know where to go?

Not A Novel is like a meditation for what Erpenbeck has written about previously. She questions the nature of people’s attitude toward the German Democratic Republic, a country that no longer exists, which is still being condemned as a violator of human rights and proof of the failure of the socialist experiment of the twentieth century. Many former East Germans describe their former lives in the GDR as ein ganz normales Leben “A perfectly normal life”, according to Mary Fulbrook’s The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. Similarly, Erpenbeck also recounts many happy stories of her childhood, growing up in East Berlin about which she says: “There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth.” Quite a good metaphor, through the innocence of a child growing up in East Berlin, the sight of the Wall might as well be the ends of the earth.

She also brings to attention, the notion of freedom, a word that has come into many usages with regards to the fall of the Wall. In the essay Homesick for Sadness, Erpenbeck questions “… Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’re finished shopping?)” The price of freedom, as Erpenbeck reflects, is her life until that point which suddenly belongs to the past. Suddenly people talked about money, the real estate prices skyrocketed, and even former apartment owners attempted to claim their ownerships for properties confiscated by the East German government after they left for the West. A new standard suddenly used to measure success, and in this turbulent transition era, Erpenbeck decided to write.

Erpenbeck’s creative process as a writer is being laid bare in this volume. She was only 22 when the Wall fell, and still a university student. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, many former East Germans suddenly found themselves unemployed in the reunified Germany. A new standard is kicking in, and it is no exception for Erpenbeck who studied to become an opera director, she couldn’t find employment except at a bakery where she arrived at work early in the morning and repeated the same sequences over and over again. It was the 1990s, and Erpenbeck began writing The Old Child and Other Stories, carrying the baggage of her past memories in the GDR and hiding inside her nameless character who pretends to be fourteen years old.

She grew up in a long line family of writers. Her paternal grandparents, Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner, were critically-acclaimed writers of their time who lived in exile in the Soviet Union during Hitler’s rule and returned to help to construct a new socialist state in the eastern part of Germany. Her father, John Erpenbeck, has already published several novels before the fall of the Wall. And her mother, Doris Kilias was an Arabic translator who translated the works of the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz into German. Looking at her biography, it looks natural enough that Jenny Erpenbeck herself will turn into a writer, yet it was the fall of the Wall that brought her voice to a reunified Germany. Coming of age at the end of history is a turning point for Erpenbeck, who decided to write against the silence of the time.

This volume is probably a testament to Erpenbeck’s commitment to bring voices of the people who are silenced by the change of tides in history, people who suddenly faced displacement and questioned the nature of Heimat. Her writings could touch upon numerous issues and I could see her genuine concerns for some particular problems. Despite the fact that this volume is not translated by Susan Bernofsky, Erpenbeck's translator for her previous literary works, Kurt Beals could bring the voice of Erpenbeck nicely here.

Hearing her talks several times through podcast episodes and recorded YouTube lectures, Erpenbeck likes to interject difficult questions posed by her audiences with the funny remark “That’s an interesting question”, before jokingly laughs, after which she explains to the audience that she writes slowly short-hand with the typing sounds “Chak, chak, chak” slowly, instead of “Chak, chak, chak, chak, chak” that was typed faster through the keyboard of some of her fellow writers. She enjoys the moment, covets time in her own space, and creates a universe of her own to recount the story of others.

[Kairi]

Värske, aus ja analüütiline esseekogumik Ida-Saksamaal üles kasvanud autori sulest. Raamatusse on kogutud kahekümne aasta vältel kirja pandud lapsepõlvemälestusi, mõtisklusi kirjandusest ja kirjutamisest, kunstist ja loojatest, piiridest, mälust ja poliitikast. Kõike seda saadab autori selge pilk ja vahe sulg, ta ei libastu sentimentaalsusesse või nostalgiasse, kirjutab peaaegu kinematograafiliselt, kõik on justkui siin ja praegu. Tekstid kirjanikuks kujunemisest alates esimestest kõhklevatest katsetustest kuni küpsemiseni tunnustatud autoriks on omamoodi sisevaatlused, kus autor püüab lahata oma lapsepõlve ja selle mõju. Autor on ise öelnud, et kui ta midagi ei mõista ega suuda seda sõnadesse panna, püüab ta sellest kirjutada, et analüüsi käigus asja harutada. Tulemus on siin: erakordselt vahe ja isiklik lugemine ilma maitsetute enesepaljastusteta.

[Rachel Vardeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard about Not a Novel a few years ago, likely around when it came out, and then had the good luck of finding it at the free library next to my house. I was interested in it because I love the idea of a "mixed media" or vignette style memoir. Little did I know how deeply this book would touch and speak to me.

Not a Novel opens with a tedious recollection of the process the living often go through (especially only children) following death of, in this instance, Erpenbeck's mother. Of the random things one acquires (shampoo bottles, old medicines, jewelry, a pressure cooker) and the weird but incredibly valid shit we find ourselves doing in our grief, like burying said pressure cooker. At the end she says, "Now I'd like to call my mother" and in that weird death cleaning space and tirelessly acquiring, that's all there is left to say.

Erpenbeck goes on to give us small snapshots of her life in these short essays and vignettes and even better, a meandering piece of her brain. Of her love for music and how it shapes reality (another way this book made me feel seen), it's pull and place in the spacetime continuum.

I think I could go on and on, but I'll end with this. And when I die and anyone close to me remembers this, please read the following at my funeral:

"We know only one thing: that behind everything we can see, hear, and touch another reality is concealed - a reality that we can't see and can't hear and can't touch, a reality made of Time. We know that transformations lie before us, we know that transformations lie behind us and we know according to scientific findings, that the present belongs to us for precisely 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past. That means that every 3 seconds we produce ourselves again a strangers.

What should I say, then, when I am asked to say who I am?"

[Katie Killebrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny Erpenbeck is one of my favorite living authors. It was a pleasure to learn more about her and the way she observes the world.

“Not a Novel” contains so many worthwhile turns of phrase and entire paragraphs to underline, but this is the only one I came across when I actually had a pen in my hand:

“In happy moments of reading we become aware of something that corresponds to us. And even if we forget certain details over the years—a given story line or character—and even if we remember certain others; the most important things sink in deeper than our memories, we internalize them, take them into our bodies, and they stay there, blind and mute like our hearts, our kidneys, our bones, keeping us alive.” (p148-149)

[Kevin S · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5 tbh. I love Jenny Erpenbeck but man these particular speeches bury her thesis in the most vague language possible. her end section on society and politics happens to slap but it's the only clear and concise part of this collection.

[Vincent Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did not know this German author existed a few months ago. But I was reading something somewhere and her name came up accompanied by intriguing remarks. Looked her up. Four novels, which I'd usually go for initially, but went for her collected non-fiction (but much chopped down in English version - seems the German version of this book is over 600 pages; this "selection" doesn't even make it to 200 pages. But what's there is high quality material. Vivid but effortless writing, thoughts that do not suffer fools gladly. Covers the personal, arts, society, in which she really does not hold back. Shall investigate her novels in due course.

[Chrystyna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a Novel by Jenny Erpenbeck - Very Good

I love the author's fiction, it is always beautifully written and thought provoking. This, however, is a collection of essays, speeches and talks that she has given over the years. Split into three sections: Life, Literature and Music and Society, I prefered the first and last sections as they were more personal. I'm afraid I was never very good at understanding subtext and inner depth of novels so the section on Literature and Music was a bit 'over my head' - although I do now have a deeper understanding of some of her books, so not a complete waste of reading time ;-)

For me, the real interest is her life. She grew up in East Berlin with 'The Wall' making a cul-de-sac of her street. She used to tell the time by looking out of her window, across to West Berlin and a clock on a building there. I found her feelings when The Wall fell and how it impacted her life fascinating.

"It takes us an entire lifetime to unravel the mysteries of our own lives. Layer upon layer of knowledge accumulates upon the past, revealing it anew each time as a past that we certainly lived through, but couldn't even begin to understand."

"Freedom wasn't given freely, it came at a price, and that price was my entire life up to that point."

It took me longer than usual to read such a slight volume, but I'm glad I took the time, thought and effort to do so. Now I want some more fiction from her. I believe there's a novel due later this year! I also want to read some of the books she mentions in this book. Hopefully Edinburgh Library Service will have some of the more obscure titles for me to borrow.

#review

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If the language that you can speak isn't enough that's a very good reason to start writing. As paradoxical as it may be: The impossibility of expressing what happens to us in words is what pushes us towards writing. Whenever I have not been able to understand something, have not been able to capture it in words, that's when I've started writing."
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Thoughts~
An honest and amusing look into Erpenbeck's life and work. These essays are divided into three parts, Life, Literature and Music, and Society. Erpenbeck gives her coming of age in Berlin. How early on she was absorbed by music and theater. She talks of the fall of the Berlin wall when she was only twenty two, astutely examining her own country's grim past. And then through her journey to becoming a writer, sharing some of her favorite literary influences as well. This was an interesting read! My favorite parts were where she shares about her own writing thought process and of her childhood. If you haven't read her books before definitely check them out, she's a beautiful writer.
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Thank You to @pgcbooks for sending this my way, opinions are my own.
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[Jenn C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What we don’t know, is infinite.” - pg 34

That quote from Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not A Novel sums up how I feel when reading a collection of essays that touch upon such broad subjects from the grief of losing her mother, what it was like to be a child in East Germany and to then lose her country, to the relationship between music and writing, and the countless questions around refugees. This collection of essays reminded me a bit of Rebecca Solnit, who can also write about what seems any topic in the world, and make you, at least while you’re reading completely absorbed in the topic. You are suddenly extremely interested in things you had no idea you were interested in. Thought provoking writing that opens your mind, allows you to see new “blind spots in your own consciousness” as Erpenbeck refers to them. This is the type of writing that makes you feel like a better person at the end of it - not better as in superior- but a better person for having the mind and heart opening experience of contemplation.

I highly recommend any of her writing and I eagerly await her next endeavor.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one else is like Erpenbeck.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve really enjoyed Erpenbeck’s fiction but this was a bit of a mixed bag for me. The essays that I liked I really liked, but there were others that were just too clever and esoteric for me. In short I really enjoyed what she wrote about her childhood in East Germany and experiencing the fall of the Berlin Wall as well her thoughts on ‘the west’ and the situation of refugees but struggled with the more complex essays on literature and communication. This is undoubtedly more my lack than Erpenbeck’s but be prepared that elements of this are probably more academic than would be expected from some of the marketing.

[Belle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up because the author was in her early 20s when she wrote many of the pieces within it while she was just beginning her career as a writer, and she talks a lot about her experience with the destruction of the the Berlin wall and her experience with socialism and then liberation. Having not known too much about the history of socialism, I found this memoir enlightening. And real. When she describes the buildings and lights she can see beyond the wall, it seems too unreal to be true... I definitely am looking forward to reading more of her works.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Whew. Whoa.

I spend over a week immersing myself in this book. Erpenbeck calls it a memoir in pieces. It is that, but it is oh so much more. The book is divided into three segments -- Life, Literature and Music, and Society. I would call the pieces in each section essays.

In Life, Erpenbeck writes about herself. The first piece, At the Ends of the Earth, focuses on her growing up in East Berlin. She lived in two places that were basically at the base of the Berlin Wall. The second piece, Open Bookkeeping, concerns how she reacted and what she did when her mother died. The third piece, Pressure Cooker, fits like a puzzle piece to the second. It concerns how she dealt with her mother's pressure cooker. The fourth piece, John, concerns notes she received, seemingly when she was a teen, from an admirer. The fifth piece, Homesick for Sadness, are reflections on the fall of the wall and what happened to the places of her youth. The sixth piece, Hope, and concerns the hopes of her family (and her own). It ends: Hope was always a sort of glue that held my family together. Some of my family's hopes were fulfilled, others were not. The last piece, Time, is a speech Erpenbeck gave when she was inducted into the Berlin Academy of the Arts in 2015. Erpenbeck states in this piece: Time has the power to separate us, not only from others, but also from ourselves -- a fact that's hard to grasp. We know that time also separates us from circumstances that might have turned us into very different people. We know it, but we don't understand it. There are themes in these very personal essays that show up again and again in the next two sections.

The second section is called Literature and Music and is composed of 14 pieces. Some of the pieces are speeches. Three are lectures given at the University of Bamberg. I was particularly taken by the first lecture, called On 'The Old Child,' the title of Erpenbeck's first novel. In it she considers the subject of how much of a character's story should be told. I marked the following paragraph, which I reread a few times in marvel of the concept espoused:

Before I started writing the story of the old child, of course, I had thought about which part of the story I should tell. That may be the hardest question to answer for any story. It's not just a matter of what interests you, it's also a matter of what sort of space takes shape beyond the parts that you tell. It's a question of what need not, or cannot, be said. The part that isn't told takes on great power, if you look at the story from the right perspective, often even greater power than the parts that's revealed. As paradoxical as it may seem: The untold side of a story can weigh even heavier in a reader's mind than its twin, the hollow form of a story that is actually told. This preponderance of one of the two sides -- sides which actually ought to correspond (correspond) to one another -- may result from the fact that the half of the story that's told allows the reader to remain ensconced within it, but the half of the story that's untold requires the reader to be constantly aware of the fact that it remains untold, whether he wants to or not. Therefore, even while the reader constructs some concrete untold story for himself out of the story that is told -- even while he imagines a 'real,' more or less comprehensible story -- he never forgets that the untold half, the story that he has only imagined, is a story that could not be spoken, could not be written, for one reason or another -- therefore he regards this speechless part from inside and outside at the same time, and that is probably why the concealed part carries so much weight.

The last section, Society, contains only two short pieces and broadly address refugee policy. The second piece, the last essay in the book, was given as a keynote speech at the University of Oklahoma in 2018. It is called Blind Spots and was a brilliant choice for ending the book. In it Erpenbeck returns to the two parts of her life - pre and post wall - and relates that experience, both as a personal experience and as a general experience, to the plight of refugees today and the concept of borders. She asks what is different about the flight of East Germans to West Germany from the flight of refugees from any number of countries (the ones Trump called shitholes) to European countries and the US? She ends with the following thought:

The experiences, memories, hopes, traumas, griefs, and joys of all people, including the disregarded and discarded, spread their branches far and wide, across places and times, obeying rules that we barely know. What appears from the perspective of Europe or North American to be nothing but a blind spot is, in fact, an entire world, whether we look at it or not -- even if these worlds are hidden behind walls, fences, in far-off camps, or in the bad neighborhood around the corner. An eight-meter-high fence is not a sign of strength but a sign of fear. A sign of the fear of being questioned. Fear of loss, poverty, and death. That is our fear, and it is no different from the fear of the people on the other side of the fence. For we were made from dust, and to dust we shall return. In other words: We, you and I, come from shitholes, too.

Jenny Erpenbeck is, I think, an author for the ages. Put her on the list of those deserving Nobel consideration.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

First third contains wonderful autobiographical essays. Then, abruptly, it transitions into three long lectures on Erpenbeck’s philosophy of writing, followed by various reviews she has written and acceptance speeches she has delivered.

The intimacy with the author is shattered and the feeling is of reading recycled material. Whether the fault of translation, or not, the tone of these later writings can come across as conceited and self-indulgently cryptic. But the final essay, delivered to an audience in America about the nature and consequences of Western borders, reminds the reader how good the early writings were.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a sweet memoir told in a series of essays. It’s also an insight to her anger about inequity. It’s familiar, atmospheric and nostalgic. I’ve admired all her work and appreciate learning about why she writes and how her experience in a communist country drives her thoughts. Her childhood was a happy one but her philosophy on life has been shaped by communism. Her empathy toward immigrants is better understood through this lens. I learned more about her work and admire it that much more.

[Marian]

I DNF'd about a third of the way in, so I'll refrain from rating. Outside some pieces in the beginning about growing up literally a few yards east of the Wall, I found myself seldom engaging with the author's bland observations, literal lectures, and somewhat generic-feeling occasional essays. She writes compelling, sometimes formally daring fiction. Nonfiction not so much, as far as I was able to read.

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read 2 of Erpenbeck's novels, I was pleased to learn more about her and the issues that motivate her in this series of essays (many of which were remarks given upon receipt of a prize or induction into a group).