Go, Went, Gone [Paperback]

A retired widower and classics professor takes an interest in African migrants staging a hunger strike in Berlin and finds himself tumbling into a world of harrowing stories and men who share a common sense of loss.This brilliantly understated novel traces with uncommon delicacy and depth the interior transformation of a retired German classicist named Richard. Erpenbeck possesses an uncanny ability to portray the mundane interactions and routines that compose everyday life, which she elevates into an intimately moving meditation on one of the great issues of our times. Her economical prose lends existential significance to the most commonplace conversations, defined less by what they include than by what they omit.The plight of asylum seekers as told through a retired university professor...Very moving.Beautifully haunting.This timely novel brings together a retired classics professor in Berlin and a group of African refugees. The risk of didacticism is high, but the books rigor and crystalline insights pay off, aesthetically and morally.A highly sophisticated work.Calls to mind J.M. Coetzee, whose flat, affectless prose wrests coherence from immense social turmoil. By making the predicament of the refugee banal and quotidian, Erpenbeck helps it become visible.The best novel to date about the migration refugee crisis, German novelist Jenny ErpenbecksErpenbecks prose, intense and fluent, is luminously translated by Susan Bernofsky.Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating, ferocious as well as virtuosic.This new novel by the author of The End of Days and Visitation is full of departures and disappearances. It is both a gripping story about the life of the modern migrant and a meditation on how we all find meaning in life.Erpenbeck works with a dramatists impulse to extremes and a composers ear for the resonant phrase. She can catch a murmur on the air and send it echoing up and down a hundred tormented years.Erpenbeck is scathing about the abslĂ*