Book Review of GO, WENT, GONE by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated from German in 2017)
SPOILER ALERT:
“This thought opens its jaws wide, displaying its frightening teeth.”
In the vein of many excellent German novels, GO, WENT, GONE is a bildungsroman, though not a story of youthful maturation. This narrative of the protagonist’s journey is dense enough to call it a treatise on the challenges of aging and insignificance, a state of mind when there is, perhaps, nothing more to wish for.
Richard’s journey into continuing significance begins after his wife’s death, his abandonment by his mistress, and his retirement from a long and orderly career as a Classics professor. From the first pages, it is clear the narrative is literary and to be punctuated throughout with digressions into morality, history, philosophy, and judgment regarding the human condition.
To be sure, Richard renders persuasive observations about German culture; his early life in East Germany; and his greater familiarity with the East’s landmarks than those of the West, but the guiding metaphor concerns the death of an unknown man who drowned in the local lake but whose body has not yet resurfaced—a type of Schrodinger’s cat caught between being invisible and being relevant.
What lurks below the surface of Richard’s consciousness propels his unexpected transition from ponderous academic to social radical. The vehicle of that transformation is a group of African men beleaguered by myriad psychic and physical hardships. They entered Germany from Italy–where they were legitimate refugees but unable to find jobs–by way of their former home in Libya. As non-Libyan refugees who fled the Arab Spring violence, most are ineligible for German asylum and live in the limbo of attempting to survive without earnings on an ever-decreasing store of hope.
Of Germany’s uncharitable treatment of this influx, Richard observes that his government—whose Eastern and Western blocs were happily reunited during his adulthood—is “now defending borders with articles of law—assailing newcomers with their secret weapon call time … crushing them with months.”
Their hunger strike comes to his attention, and, his curiosity piqued, he observes a demonstration in a Berlin park. They refuse to name themselves and display a placard that reads: WE BECOME VISIBLE.
Their demonstration is successful enough to land them communal housing and a small stipend in a former nursing home, and Richard decides he will learn what brought them to Germany with its sea of white faces and dearth of opportunities.
The refugees who choose to engage with Richard are compelling, multi-dimensional characters with tragic histories, lost families, and cell phones. Of the phones, he writes: “what belongs to them is invisible and made of air.” They have no work prospects, no home, and no future. One informant tells him that the war destroyed everything, and that he has himself become foreign, that he no longer has a picture of himself.
He is invisible and in need of relief. In his understated way and with no obvious goal (except perhaps lust for an attractive Egyptian German-language teacher), Richard is persuaded to step up.
His interactions with the homeless Africans and his established, long-term friends provide him with a quasi-academic distraction during his retirement, but he is soon conscripted into the bureaucratic challenge to these homeless people.
He does what he does best—research. To his astonishment, he learns that Saharan Tuareg culture pulls him under the surface of his imagined expertise in classical history, and he comes to understand the limits he had imposed on his understanding. This and other revelations jolt him out of his complacency.
The one humorous or perhaps only ironic, passage in the novel takes place in Richard’s car. He’s driving some refugees and teaching them the lyrics of a German song, a wild sing-along that greatly concerns passing motorists. Song, music, and language are motifs that do much of the heavy lifting in the expansion of Richard’s capacity to welcome change.
This short episode of interracial camaraderie and joyous harmony within the shelter of a moving vehicle, however, can be counterposed with Richard’s dour reflection:
“For much of his life, he’s hoped in a tiny back corner of his soul that people from Africa mourn their dead less. Death there has been a mass phenomenon for so long now. Now, this back corner of his soul is occupied instead by shame: shame that for most of his lifetime he’s taken the easy way out.”
This novel is not a nail-biter or an amusing read, and it probably helps to be an academic interested in the play of language and symbolism as much as plot or character. Perhaps few who select this book (or have it bought) have ever been so isolated from other cultures as Richard or so indifferent to the history of African nations and the effects of European colonialism. Perhaps he is set up only as a strawman whose narrow life is transformed by his embrace of broad-mindedness. Even so, Richard is a fine example of how we can shake off of our rigidity and predictability and submerge ourselves beneath the surface of things in search of heightened compassion and responsibility.