In Eastern Europe, in the early 1900s, two parents are left devastated when their baby daughter dies.
But maybe she doesn’t; maybe she survives and is later driven to desperation by a doomed romance. Or maybe she gets involved with Communist revolutionaries; becomes a celebrated writer; a senile old woman…
All of these possibilities are explored in German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s ingenious novella, winner of the English Pen Prize for this fluent translation by Susan Bernofsky.
In short stories separated, like music, by ‘intermezzi’, we follow the lead character as she travels down many divergent paths during the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, noting how such seeming trivialities regarding weather or chance encounters can alter a whole life’s outcome.
However, it’s left to the reader to decide whether it’s the nature of history or the nature of Erpenbeck that all of them turn out to be so bleak.
