Short & Satisfying Book Club: "Things That Disappear" by Jenny Erpenbeck

The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: “Is there a perpetrator who makes things that I know and cherish disappear?” These things disappear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist? Translated beautifully by Kurt Beals, Things That Disappear follows on the heels of Erpenbeck’s Booker Prize–winning novel Kairos and offers a window into a renowned writer’s sense of the past, and of her own self as a writer.

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. New Directions publishes her books The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words, and Visitation, which NPR called “a story of the century as seen by the objects we’ve known and lost along the way.” The End of Days won the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize, and is the author’s representative text for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her most well-known work, Go, Went, Gone, was longlisted for The Man Booker International Prize in 2018, of which New Yorker critic James Wood noted that the book would be cited “[when] Erpenbeck wins the Nobel Prize.” Following her insightful non-fiction essay collection Not a Novel, comes the new novel Kairos, longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. In his praise for Kairos, John Powers emphatically stated on NPR that he fully expects "Erpenbeck to win the Nobel Prize sometime in the next five years.” An epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature, Erpenbeck lives in Berlin.

Kurt Beals is an associate professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St Louis. He has previously translated books by Anja Utler, Regina Ullmann, and Reiner Stach.

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