The Prose of Erpenbeck

Reading The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck has been pretty impressive. She writes with an eye that both includes the grimier details of life (keeping the story grounded) but also with an almost dreamlike style of narration (that leaves you adrift in the story). It is an impressive combination of the two that has me trying to dissect how exactly she makes it work so I can try to use it in my writing.

She also, just structurally, depicts grief and grieving amazingly well. The story begins at the funeral for an infant, with the parents mourning, and both her depictions of two different cultures grieving (the mother Jewish, the father lapsed non-practicing Catholic) as well as how the story is told gives you an eye on just how shattered an event like that could leave a family.

Shattered is actually the best word for it, the story is told in snippets. No names, not for the main characters (lending to it being a bit dreamlike), no chapter titles (each paragraph / perspectives is numbered), and you are never told when the perspective shifts whose skin you are occupying for a few lines now (lending to the slightly disconnected dreamlike quality of the story). How the story is told, it is as if the individual stories of the characters, the puzzles that made up their lives, were all dropped upon the floor and broken to pieces and the story was assembled then out of pieces from each of the varied puzzles put back together again.

I am finding it both a fast and a slow read. The individual snippets are short enough that I seem to breeze through them reading quickly, but after a while I need to pause and let it all process and settle in my head a moment so I don’t lose track of the emotional tenses and stresses within the story. I should be reading it slower, taking more time to see how it was assembled to suss out all of the choices that were made in the writing, but I want to find out the whole of the story and then go back and re-read it again to dissect it further.

It is making me ponder how I would use it in my own prose writings, and trying to picture how other books would be written in this manner. Can almost picture The Big Sleep by Chandler being written in this style, the predominance of the narrative being from Marlowe’s perspective but with bits and moments seen through the eyes of the surrounding characters, stripping the names from the story making it a bit more surreal and maybe even a bit grimmer, leave him with his name maybe so he retains his existence as a character, strip the names from everyone else (maybe except the victim) so they are more roles that are played or caricatures than people.

Just pondering how it would work, not sure I have a story in-process right now that I could write like this. Closest I think I can come in terms of style that I’ve seen like this in what I’ve read lately, might be The Real Story by Stephen R Donaldson, the first book of his Gap Cycle, where he depicted the same sequence of events again and again from different viewpoints, moving from a distant outside observer of a brief scene further in step-by-step to the main characters who would play parts in the series to come. Different greatly from what Jenny Erpenbeck did, but the closest I can think of right now in terms of its effect.

It is also impressive, as I think about it, that this is literature in translation. Originally in German, Susan Bernofsky did an amazing translation job. Makes me wish somewhat that I could read German so I could read it in the original as well and compare how well the translation actually worked for the story. It is one thing to appreciate it in English, but I can’t quite fathom how hard the translation job might have been.