Presenting an interesting take on modern German history, a best-selling German novel of fate presents five different stories describing the possible lives and deaths at varying stages of maturity experienced by a single character.
The End of Days, a brilliant novel of contingency and fate, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five books, each leading to a different death of the same unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos. 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 death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there...A novel of incredible breadth yet amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of twentieth-century German and German-Jewish history by one of the finest, most exciting authors alive (Michael Faber).
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated novel of 2014, now a New Directions paperback
Recenzijas
"Words and stories and memory are the vehicle by which the reader moves, intoxicatingly and fearlessly, through a dizzying but magnificent series of terrains." -- Michele Filgate - The Boston Globe "Wonderful, elegant and exhilarating, ferocious as well as virtuosic: The End of Days is her most direct address to history." -- Deborah Eisenberg - The New York Review of Books "One of the finest, most exciting authors alive." -- Michael Faber "Dreamlike, almost incantatory prose." -- Vogue "Beautiful and ambitious. Erpenbecks graceful prose suits the understated tone of this Hans Fallada Prize winner." -- Publishers Weekly, (starred review) "The brutality of her subjects, combined with the fierce intelligence and tenderness at work behind her restrained, unvarnished prose, is overwhelming." -- Nicole Krauss
Papildus informācija
Short-listed for International Dublin Literary Award 2016.
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.
For New Directions, Susan Bernofsky has translated Yoko Tawadas Where Europe Begins, The Naked Eye, and Memoirs of a Polar Bear (winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation), eight titles by the great Swiss-German modernist Robert Walser, and five books by Jenny Erpenbeck, including The End of Days (winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize). She is the author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, and teaches at Columbia University, where she also directs the literary translation program.
