Bøger af Jenny Erpenbeck

“En af de hårdeste og smukkeste bøger, jeg nogensinde har læst.” – The Guardian I 1986 mødes to mennesker tilfældigt ved Alexanderplatz i Østberlin. Den ene er nittenårige Katharina, den anden er Hans, som er over tredive år ældre og gift. Hun er i gang med at uddanne sig ved statstrykkeriet i DDR og kender ikke til andet end det politiske system, hun er født og opvokset i. Han er forfatter, søn af en nazist og har selv valgt at bosætte sig i DDR. I årene, der følger – de sidste før murens fald – har Katharina og Hans en hemmelig affære, der både er lidenskabelig og destruktiv, og som næres af en fælles passion for klassisk musik og kunst. Men da Katharina under en praktik på et teater er sammen med en anden, vækker det Hans’ jalousi. Deres forhold begynder at smuldre – det samme gør verden omkring dem. Kairos er en storslået og raffineret roman fra DDR-tidens Berlin af en af Tysklands største nulevende forfattere. Det er en fortælling om altopslugende kærlighed og et regime i opløsning – og om et enkelt øjeblik, der forandrer alt.

The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives  adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp. She is spared in the next chapter with the help of someone's intervention and returns to Berlin to become a respected writer. . . . The End of Days is a brilliant novel of contingency and fate. A novel of incredible breadth, yet amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of German and German-Jewish history by "one of the finest, most exciting authors alive" (Michael Faber).

A forested property on a Brandenburg lake outside Berlin lies at the heart of this darkly sensual, elegiac novel. Encompassing over one hundred years of German history, from the nineteenth century to the Weimar Republic, from World War II to the Socialist German Democratic Republic, and finally reunification and its aftermath, Visitation offers the life stories of twelve individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the last century, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation, with its drama and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.

In The Book of Words, Jenny Erpenbeck captures with amazing virtuosity the inner life of a young girl who survives the totalitarian regime of a curiously unnamed South American country (most likely Argentina during its "dirty war"). Raised by parents whose real identity ends up shocking her, the girl comes of age in a country where gunshots are mistaken for blown tires, innocent citizens are dragged off buses, and tortured and disappeared friends and family return to visit her from the dead.