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The Book of Words (New Directions Paperbook)

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The English version of this German novel by Jenny Erpenbeck has been translated by Susan Bernofsky. I have not read the translation. The German original is the work of a first class word smith and an outstanding writing talent.

In the beginning was the Word. The heroine is lost in words and she can not find her way. We are in a literary puzzle. A young woman recollects her childhood. Her language is precise German with a distinct East German touch. We are in the head of the child. The child sees and hears things and tries to make sense of them.

Her upbringing is partly in German. We know that from the verbal `memes' (the term that Dawkins uses for cultural equivalents of genes) that the child finds or remembers or encounters: the rhymes, the songs, the prayers.
Many of these memes are the same that I grew up with, though I am 20 years older than the author Erpenbeck, and though I grew up near the Western borders of Germany, in the French occupied zone, not like she did in the formerly Russian zone, now (during her childhood) officially the German Democratic Republic, and in the present time an odd subject of contradictory memories and myths.

The places that the child lives in are of a mongrel kind. We seem to be in East Germany and then we seem to be in Argentina. Only her grandmother remembers snow. That must be her mother's mother. She came over the ocean, from far away. Mother has a brother and a sister, but her father has died. Snow covered the ground for months over there. The sun nearly always shines here.

The child's father did not come from Germany, his parents live in Argentina and are visited every year by train or car. Is the German background a deliberate obfuscation? Is Erpenbeck deliberately confusing these countries? Or is it not confusion, but fusion? Are we in a practical application of totalitarianism theory? We are certainly not in a realistic narration that we can take literally.

The girl's father, as we find out, has an important position and is friends with the men whose stone monuments stand in the parks. He is in charge of creating order. He is, in other words, torturer and murderer on a grand scale.

The child has a wetnurse (she drinks her milk until rather late), who takes the child to popular altars for a local saint, Difunta Correa. This is what wikipedia knows about Difunta:
According to popular legend, Deolinda Correa was a woman whose husband was forcibly recruited around the year 1840, during the Argentine civil wars. Becoming sick, he was then abandoned by the Montoneras [partisans]. In an attempt to reach her sick husband, Deolinda took her baby child and followed the tracks of the Montoneras through the desert. When her supplies ran out, she died. Her body was found days later by gauchos that were driving cattle through, and to their astonishment found the baby still alive, feeding from the deceased woman's "miraculously" ever-full breast. (end of quote from wiki)

Another hint at biological distance is that the girl's mother has blue eyes, while her own are black. We assume early on that the girl is adopted. She is very attached to her father. In the course of the story we learn fairly precisely what has happened, and she understands quite clearly what her father has done. She waits for him to be released from jail.

This short book is a fascinating text by a promising writer. I have been made aware of her by several reviews written by friends, and I have tried not to remember their opinions when writing this review. The narration is composed of short text pieces which require close attention. After all, we have to decypher different time levels from early childhood to young adulthood, and we need to sort out different places. People are either people or ghosts. Gun shots are fireworks or bursting tires or somebody killing rats or pigeons or stray dogs. Corpses are either buried under lawns or dumped into the ocean from airplanes.

Do you know that spooky little girl, perhaps six years old, whose eyes seem to glisten with a critique of her world far beyond her years? Sure, everybody knows a little girl like that, right? She's the narrator of this novella, or rather it's her random thoughts that stream through our observation of her world. But how old is she in fact? She ages at least a decade in the book, but in spurts of quantum subtlety without ever maturing beyond her initial eerie ingenuousness. She's been strictly "protected' ... for good reasons, as you'll eventually discover ... and insulated from a very harsh reality in which her Father is a mysterious force. She's an only child of a family of wealth and seemingly of power, since chatty visitors in her own home are identical to the stone statues being erected day by day in the parks of her city. She lives in a South American country, in a city where 'it almost never rains.' Her country isn't named in the novella -- perhaps because the girl is too young or isolated to know the names of countries as 'words' -- but there are clues that it must be a version of Argentina during the Dirty Wars or of Chile during the years of American-sponsored Pinochet fascism. I'm inclined toward Chile, chiefly because the themes and the literary style of the German Jenny Erpenbeck remind me a lot of the early novellas of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. In composing her narrative within the mind of an intuitive child, Erpenbeck also has a forerunner in her own language, Irmgard Keun, the author of "Child of All Nations."

This is a short, taut, haunting novella telling of the girl's discovery of Evil, of lies and brutality all around her uneasy security. Her country is a "police state" devoted to Order, and ready to impose that Order by erasures, disappearances, transformations of things 'signified' -- people included -- into empty 'signifiers', words that no longer mean specific things, words exploded into horrid dreams. The girl knows, even in her first mental meanderings, that things are disappearing or not being allowed to appear in her world, but author Erpenbeck doesn't let her observe physical violence until page 43 of a 79-page novella, at which moment the girl watches a woman being dragged off a bus by her hair, by anonymous order-keepers. Her Father later assures her that it was nothing significant, that the woman is naturally okay now.

Jenny Erpenbeck grew up under the corrupt oppression of Col War East Germany. Patently this novella reflects that experience. The Mother, whom the girl quietly hates, came to 'this' sunny country from a land of snow -- presumably Germany -- where the girl's Grandfather murdered babies, according to family lore, by tossing them in the air and shooting them before their parents' eyes. Whatever Order means to the elders of this family, the girl thinks, must have come here from that older country's Order: ""Perhaps my grandmother brought this withering along with her from the place where my mother was an infant, her face gray and white beneath the woolen cap, brought this drying-out from that other world where for several months a year everything lies beneatha layer of snow.""

Later, when the Father inevitably tries to explain himself to his daughter, he says: ""What is sick will die out ... just as in Nature. ... That which is wrong will not survive. ... But the future belong to us."" Sound familiar? But I can't reveal any more. This is a chilling story, a dark vision of the menace of 'moral order' imposed by an ideological elite. The writing is extremely fine -- mordant, piquant, bittersweet. Somewhere in this world of "endless forms most beautiful," there must be such a thing as a Stinging Butterfly; Evolution wouldn't neglect such an obvious adaptation. In the world of written words, Jenny Erpenbeck is a Stinging Butterfly.

... wonders the child, "I must seize memory like a knife and turn it against itself, stabbing memory with memory. If I can." The old idiom "seeing is believing" is turned on its head: everything, the young girl muses, has turned into its opposite. "For me," she recalls, "words used to be stable, fixed in place, but now I'm letting them all go..." With such a poignant opening scenario Jenny Erpenbeck draws us immediately and deeply into a world that is both real and surreal. In a language that is both very poetic and at the surface undemanding, her story evolves into a profound, intricately structured and deeply affecting fictional memoir that reads at times like a fable, but then again also as a realistic account of a young girl's coming of age in extraordinary circumstances.

While the events surrounding the girl's sheltered life suggest a concrete time and place, even without naming the country, the author is at pains to illustrate conditions and responses that many a young person may have to confront in a country under totalitarian rule. A rule in which, at least for a while, the young may be protected from the realities outside their pleasant cage by "high walls" and where gunshots are being interpreted as "blowing tires". Her friend Anna presents her with the most outlandish explanations for everything unusual that occurs, some funny, some macabre, but delivered with deadpan expression. The girl wonders, however, and tries to bring the different experiences into some reality she can understand. Her father, who adores her and spends evenings playing with her, usually avoids a direct comment to such explanations that she passes on to him. She is too young to worry her pretty head about it.

As she grows, more strictures affect her directly: in school, where she tried to look like everybody else, within the larger family, after she overhears conversations in which she is labelled as "there is something inherently spoiled about her". Most irritating are the confines her mother, the woman with eyes "the colour of water", imposes on her without explanations or motherly warmth to offset the increasing distance between mother and child. The girl has many questions about what she observes and the people around her and those who suddenly disappear from her immediate environment. But while she shares her questions and reflections with us, the readers, she remains reluctant to confront those around her. Eventually, as can be expected, the house of cards that had been build around her collapses...

It is not easy to convey the beauty of Erpenbeck's writing, despite its sombre topic, without revealing too much of the detailed content of the novel. In a short ninety pages, she creates a rich and emotionally charged universe that reaches far beyond the individual's story. Erpenbeck, who herself grew up under the confines and strictures of the East German state, brings her experiences to bear, although more in suggested parallels and hints than openly. Most evident is the frequent use of lines from German folksongs, ditties, or children rhymes. In the context of this novel, the often crude violence in such ancient sayings, which, as children, we would have repeated without understanding the content, underscores her concern about language and the many meanings of words. Susan Bernofsky, Erpenbeck's translator, adds some context to these and other aspects of the novel. However, I would strongly urge the reader NOT to look at the afterword before reading the book.

Having read THE BOOK OF WORDS ("Wörterbuch" in German, which incidentally suggests more complex connotations than the English title) following her brilliant, more recent novel, Visitation, I was prepared for Erpenbeck's extraordinary ability to mould language and imagery to her very personal needs and vision. In her home country she is widely regarded as the most poetic and innovative writer of the younger German writer generation. While her language and style are not the easiest to connect to, yet, once you do, you very likely can become hooked. Her latest novel, "Dinge, die verschwinden" (Things that disappear - not yet available in English) pursues her deep connection with words and their meanings. Friederike Knabe]

Let me state my point of view right from the start: I think Jenny Erpenbeck may just well be one of the very finest writers at work today. Her book Visitation has lingered for months after reading it, and her earlier book, The Book of Words is spellbinding in its spareness and power.

The narrator, an unnamed little girl, relates the world around her in a prism of innocence. She attends school, goes on idyllic trip with her wet nurse although she's way past the age of breastfeeding, and lives in an unnamed country - presumably Argentina - where the sun seems to be eternally shining.

But read the words carefully and just about every single paragraph in this short 90-page book is underpinned with menace. "A ball is a thing that rolls and sometimes bounces. A father is a man who stays taller than you for a long time...If a person wants to play ball with someone's head, only the nose would get in the way."

As readers, we know that there are dark incidents happening right out of the periphery of the little girl's sight. Her wet nurse receives a "gift" of a box of hands. The gardener goes on a "vacation." And, when her father, a high-ranking government official, calmly reveals the secrets to his daughter, the effect is so chilling that it's almost hard to read the words...but at this point, the emotional investment in the book is so complete that it's equally difficult to draw away.

From the unnamed narrator: "Why does mankind have so many languages? I ask my father as we are walking back to his parent's house hand in hand after the service. So now can anyone just come and take a word away from the thing it belongs to..." Words - innocent, simple words - become fraught with sinister meaning: heat, cold, wet...hands, eyes, nose, mouth. People disappear and words no longer mean what they say.

The girl who has been meticulously instructed by her father to use words actually uses them in her own way to tell a different story: "Those who. Then their friends. Those who remember. Who are afraid. And finally everyone. Everyone everyone." Words are dropped, commas disappear, people vanish as well. Jenny Erpenbeck takes the words she explores and dissects to create another masterpiece.

"Father and mother. Ball. Car. These might be the only words that were still intact when I learned them. [...] A ball is a thing that rolls and sometimes bounces. A father is a man who stays taller than you for a long time. Before my father goes to confession, he shaves and puts on a clean shirt. If a person wanted to play ball with someone's head, only the nose would get in the way." A small girl growing up in a middle-class family in an unnamed Latin American country, presumably Argentina, tries to assemble her impressions of childhood. Her father who works in a white palace downtown. Her mother with eyes the color of water, who puts her to sleep with the Brahms Lullaby. Her beloved wet nurse, resembling "a faerie with green slanting eyes." The gardener who goes on a long vacation and never returns. The assemblies at school, saluting the flag. The sound of tires going pop in a nearby street. Her friend Anna with tall stories about lovers shooting each other in suicide pacts. Angels falling from a sun-washed sky into a steel-gray sea. Words which mean one thing and then another, or nothing at all.

Erpenbeck's novella is mesmerizing from beginning to end. It is only a child's imagination, after all, and the hints of violence are nightmares she will presumably get over. But she doesn't. Her world gradually contracts, as the people in her life are suddenly there no more, only to return to visit her without heads or hands but happy as ghosts. Grass grows between the paving stones where she played hopscotch; a statue of her father's friend is erected in an empty park. Suddenly, with a surprising lurch, we discover that she has become a whole lot older than her voice would indicate, old enough for her father to share secrets she had been too young to understand. Now looking through the book again from the beginning in order to write this review, I am hard-pressed to find a single paragraph that is not already tainted with foreknowledge of those secrets. But Erpenbeck is masterly in her pacing (until perhaps the end), and you go along willingly with her nameless little girl, simply unable to put the short book down.

Susan Bernofsky is an assured translator, leaving me in complete confidence that her abrupt shifts from childish prattle to fractured syntax must exactly match the German (which I have not seen). She also writes an informative afterword, placing the book in a historical and geographical context far better than I could do myself. As she suggests, the setting appears to be that of the Argentinian "Dirty War" of 1976-83; what I have been able to read up since shows that even Erpenbeck's more extraordinary images may be based on fact. But Bernofsky also makes the point (quoting, for example, the numerous folk songs in the text) that this is also a very German book. By writing about a totalitarian regime on the other side of the world, Erpenbeck is also commenting on the two other such regimes that devastated her own country, East Germany, in the second and third quarters of the 20th century respectively. Having now read all three of her books to be published in English, I can see that Erpenbeck's search for oblique means of examining this national pathology has been an abiding concern. THE BOOK OF WORDS (2004) thus fall midway between THE OLD CHILD (1999) and VISITATION (2008) in style as well as time, having something of the surreal symbolism of the one without yet attaining the lucid surface unity of the other. But she is a writer of the greatest power, and all three books (which just get better and better) are well worth reading.