Search Results

“... I didn’t  write the book because I wanted to become a writer,’ Jenny Erpenbeck says of her first novel – a novella really – in one of the pieces collected in Not a Novel. She was 27, had studied opera directing and was working in a bakery in her native Berlin when she started writing what would become The Old Child (1999 ...”

“... Germans on the other side of the Wall. Just because they are Germans, why should we welcome them? Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Visitation, can be read as a response or a companion to Sebald’s The Emigrants. The German title makes this clearer: Heimsuchung, ‘looking for home’, ‘returning home’. Like Sebald, ...”

“... praised on social media as ‘discursive’ and ‘weird’ (e.g. the work of Benjamin Labatut or Jenny Erpenbeck). Unfortunately, Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?Sadie Smith (the name did make me laugh ...”