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Things That Disappear
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 4 reviews on
The bestselling and award-winning German author Jenny Erpenbeck has gained international praise for her novels including Visitation, Kairos, and Go, Went, Gone. Things that Disappear is an exciting collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: "Is there some kind of perpetrator who makes things that I know cherish and disappear?" These things disappear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist? Translated beautifully by Kurt Beals, Things that Disappear follows on the heels of Erpenbeck's Man Booker-Prize winning novel Kairos and offers a window into a renowned writer's sense of the past, and of her own self as a writer.
Book Details
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publish Date: Oct 7th, 2025
- Pages: 96
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 7.00in - 4.50in - 0.50in - 0.15lb
- EAN: 9780811238113
- Categories: • European - German• Essays• Women Authors
About the Author
Erpenbeck, Jenny: -
An epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature, Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She studied theater at the Humboldt University in Berlin and directed operas in the nineties. She is also author of such books as The Old Child & Other Stories, The Book of Words, and The End of Days.
Beals, Kurt: - Kurt Beals is Visiting Associate Professor of German and Humanities Fellow in Literary Translation at the University of Richmond. He has translated such authors as Hermann Hesse, Reiner Stach, Regina Ullmann, Anja Utler, and Erich Maria Remarque.
Critics’ reviews
Praise for this book
"The impact is of a master at work--Erpenbeck ought to be considered for the Nobel."--John Domini "The Washington Post"
"The most profound, intelligent, humane, and important writer of our times."--Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating--ferocious as well as virtuosic."--Deborah Eisenberg "The New York Review of Books"
"Her retrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming."--Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love
An ethereal collection of memories, delicately rendered before their inevitable crumbling away.... A wistful record of memory and loss. Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic-- "Kirkus"
Meditative, moving, and profoundly beautiful.--Edmund de Waal
In these tender, poignant pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the silence left in the wake of an absence or disappearance. She captures the ineffable quality of memory with a quiet, haunting intensity, where a sentence or a paragraph can turn on a word and devastate.--Mary Costello
Things That Disappear captures with startling lucidity a modernity characterized by unrest, upset, and dissolution.--Philip Harris "The Cleveland Review of Books"
With its philosophical observations about everyday life compressed into brief anecdotes, the feuilleton is a venerable literary form, practiced in Germany by the likes of Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer. Now available in English in Kurt Beals's translation, Things That Disappear shows Erpenbeck to be a worthy inheritor of this tradition.-- "The New York Times"
The traces of East Germany continue to vibrate in the unsettled politics of today's Germany, and Erpenbeck applies her finely calibrated divining rod to chart that story down the decades.--Anne McElvoy "The Financial Times"
Exquisite... Erpenbeck masterfully conveys the sense of before and after that comes with living in the aftermath, moving deftly between the everyday and the ways in which history impacts it.--Necia Chronister "World Literature Today"
Erpenbeck's words are a kind of bulwark, a catalog of the minor details and inconsequential impressions that make up the course of a private life. They are her fragments, shored up against forgetting. And in reading, they become ours too.--Robert Rubsam "The Baffler"