Jenny ErpenbeckNot a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces by Kurt Beals

Abstract

Books in Review Jenny Erpenbeck Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces Trans. Kurt Beals. New York. New Directions. 2020. 212 pages. JENNY ERPENBECK’s fictional worlds offer us glimpses of what exists below the surface—of land, of water, of consciousness . In her novel Visitation (Heimsuchung , 2008), for example, the new tenants of a countryside home near Berlin are puzzled to find a crate filled with porcelain while digging a trench on the property. However, the reader knows what they don’t: that the first occupant of the house buried the family porcelain there in the 1950s before fleeing to West Berlin. In another novel, The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend, 2012), a Jewish family’s prized collection of works by Goethe “resurfaces” in an antique store in the 1990s after having been confiscated in the Nazi era and packed away in a basement. Ironically, the young man who discovers the collection in the antique store does not know it had once belonged to his family. In the novel Go, Went, Gone (Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, 2015), a person has drowned in the lake that is within view of the protagonist’s kitchen window. Because the body has not been found, swimmers do not dare enter the water. Examples of the submerged, buried, silenced, and repressed abound in Erpenbeck ’s worlds. In some of these cases, the symbolic object or person surfaces, as in the case of the porcelain and the works by Goethe, and in others, they do not. They are eventually forgotten, and life goes on aboveground. In Erpenbeck’s fiction, an underground and underwater topography of the socially repressed exists like a geological record of what has happened, and what continues to happen, in the visible world aboveground. To read Erpenbeck’s latest book—a collection of autobiographical essays, acceptance speeches for awards, and university lectures from 1999 to 2014, cleverly titled Not a Novel—is to glimpse at the underground geological record of life experiences and influences that support her fictional worlds. The texts in part 1, “Life,” recount episodes from Erpenbeck’s life that could, in themselves, be the stuff of literature: A love story is preserved in a Stasi file. A family is held together by hope in the face of persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion. A child sneaks into the ruins of an antiquity museum bombed out during World War II in order to look at the classical statues no one else knows still exist. In these essays, Erpenbeck recounts a childhood in East Berlin shaped not by the interdictions of Communist society but rather by the dead ends and illogical spaces created by the artificial division of the city and the ruins left by war. Those abandoned spaces—disregarded by the adults around her and repressed in the collective consciousness—provided her the freedom to play as a child. Now, the memory of them gives her the intellectual space to write fiction and an escape from the mandate to stay busy and productive that drives her adult life in the capitalist system. In the essays and speeches in part 2, titled “Literature and Music,” Erpenbeck reflects on her aesthetic heroes and influences, her writing process, the relationship between author and audience, reading as part of her life experience, and her love of music. In her essays on fairy tales, Ovid, Thomas Mann, Herta Müller, and more, she discusses the transformations and border transgressions that abound in literature. What she seems JENNY ERPENBECK been met with suspicion by those who claim it to be a marketing ploy yet with acclaim by those who see it as a form to destabilize the orthodox ways in which we tend to think of writing and its production. I’d venture to say that the authors of The Ferrante Letters belong to the second group. Their collaboration began in the summer of 2015 through a series of blog posts about the Neapolitan novels. These posts were not originally conceived with a book in mind but rather as an effort to cultivate “a distinct model of criticism: one deliberately oriented to the ongoing labor of thought.” In time, their exchanges evolved into a form of collective criticism...