Customer Reviews

The Old Child & Other Stories

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Jenny Erpenpeck is so talented, she has the skills and the knowhow, and the theatrical panache, to make it really big in American letters just as she has captivated Eoreupe by the simple beauty of her voice. Like Isak Dinesen, she embodies a certain European allegorization of experience, so that we seem to be reading her through, I don't know, Alencon lace, with all of experience translated for us already by the deep mulch of German thought and philosophy.

She's young, of course, where Isak Dinesen was rather old--born old I almost thought. Erpenbeck doesn't have Dinesen's huge cavities of wrinkle, and the New Directions people capitalized on her fresh-faced appeal by publishing her book with a moonfaced, ecstatic child on its cover, a child carved out of wood like a ventriloquist's dummy. After the first story is finished, we understand why, for the "old child," who winds up in an old world oprhanage and is mistreated by everyone around her, nevertheless maintains a quizzical, baroque power that stems from not having given up all of her secrets (unlike the confessional, shallow, Jerry Springer contestants who make up the cadre of Jenny Erpenbeck's op[pposite numbers in American letters). She has secrets she has shared with nobody--a saucerful. "She apppears to herself like someone who has been charred into a little ball, someone who has been charred in time as in a fire and is now nothing more than a blackened lump that has been deposited in a home for children."

I take it that the orphanage represents a larger social entity, perhaps the two halves of a Germany split by V-E day into a capitalist and a communist nation, but Erpenbeck slyly does not allow us to make the one-on-one equivalence you might find in a Burt Kennedy film. She is after more enigmatic fare. If you can imagine a female Antonioni, one with the interest in body imagery and bodily functions of Janine Antoni--sort of a cross between Antonioni and Antoni--she might be the heralded next big thing in German writing, ably translated by Susan Bernofsky, who did so well by Robert Walser in THE ROBBER and the magnificent translation of MASQUERADE, and now she has a female subject from which to speak as only she can.

The "old child" of the title story of Jenny Erpenbeck's accomplished and provocative debut prose fiction, is a fourteen year old, apparent amnesiac, found one night alone in the streets of Dresden. Not being able to discover anything more about her, she is placed in a orphanage/children's home. There, she quietly carves out a life for herself. Erpenbeck applies her condensed prose to narrating the externalities of the girl's life in the home in a precise, yet almost dead-pan voice. But then, before you realize it, her voice is also intimately connected with the child's mind - she can see beyond what is there and shares glimpses with us of what she discovers. The girl's silence and her passive acceptance of the teasing, harassing and bullying that she receives from her classmates is confusing for teachers and readers. Yet, Erpenbeck challenges us to read between the lines and connect the dots that she places for us as clues. In the end, we discover a very powerful study of "the old child" that could also be representative as much for a society in a period of upheaval and dramatic change.

In the original German, the OLD CHILD is a stand-alone publication (see my comprehensive review under the German title Geschichte vom alten Kind.). The five stories, accompanying the novel in this edition, are part of a separate eleven-story collection, Tand., published some two years after the first book. However, they complement the novel very well, in that they allow us to explore Erpenbeck's talents in creating highly visual scenarios and oblique or short intense glimpses into her characters' lives. These scenarios can come out of nowhere and are gone just as quickly, leaving us to ponder the why and how and what night happen next. An exquisite example is the brief, vignette-type, story of the girl in a triangle between her lover and his wife. On the end of the spectrum, in "Sand", the author delicately captures a long life in short memory capsules: that of an aging speech artist, as experienced by her granddaughter. This, my favourite among the short stories, touches so subtly and with such affection on all aspects of the relationship of the two - the girl growing up, stepping into the grandmother's artist shoes and the grandmother's mind slowly wandering off into confusion and nothingness - that I felt myself as an intimate observer. In the award winning short story, "Siberia", a woman returns from three-year detention in a Soviet camp, only to find another woman living with her husband and son. The story, an unusual reversal of what was a common occurrence after the war, is told obliquely, in indirect voice by the son to his own daughter. More traditional in terms of style and structure than most of the other stories, it nevertheless leaves the reader wondering how and why the primary characters behaved the way they did...

Jenny Erpenbeck, a representative of the younger German writer generation, grew up in East Germany. In an interview at the time of publication of the short story collection she reflected on the tremendous challenges her society faced when, literally from one day to the next, life was turned around: where there had been rules and regulations and strictures of all kinds, suddenly there was freedom and the need for independent thought and action. For some it was a frightening prospect. Through these glimpses into strange worlds, she, successfully, captures insights into the complexities of what this new reality could do to people. Her later books, especially BOOK OF WORDS and VISITATION expand on such questions and themes in ever more powerful way. [Friederike Knabe]

Jenny Erpenbeck's first book to be published in English consists of the title novella plus five short stories. Only one of these is at all conventional, but that is a beauty. Entitled "Hale and Hallowed," after a New Year's custom practised by German children, it is about an old woman visiting a contemporary whom she last saw in a maternity ward fifty years ago, when they were both giving birth to sons. The friend has suffered a stroke, and at first remembers nothing. But as her visitor persists, a miracle begins: "Gertrud can now remember the young face of the old woman who has appeared before her, and she realizes that an entire piece of her lifetime which she herself had so thoroughly forgotten that she was not even able to regret forgetting it has been preserved inside this woman like a cake in a cool, dark pantry." Gradually, everything begins to come back in full detail, Gertrud's gain mirroring her visitor's loss.

Most of these stories appear to be about time in one way or another. A young girl sees her actress grandmother slip into dementia, accompanied by the echoes of her old poetic voices. A female prisoner-of-war returns from Siberia, filled with an energy and determination that contrasts with her husband's degeneration. In the final story, the narrator sees "the phases of my life sitting in a circle around Death," living through childhood, an affair, exile, maturity, and old age in five brief almost abstract sections. This seems to refer back to several other stories in the book, including the strangest of all, a collage of psychosexual images entitled "The Sun-Flecked Shadows of my Skull," perhaps the surreal deconstruction of an affair, perhaps code for something else entirely.

The sense of some other meaning behind the apparent surface is strongest in the title novella, "The Story of the Old Child." An unnamed 14-year-old girl is found in the street, carrying an empty bucket. Unable to answer for herself, she is placed in an orphanage, where she willingly accepts her place at the very bottom of the childhood hierarchy, too dull to succeed in class, too heavy to be any good at games, the butt of cruel jokes, but pathetically eager and loyal. She looks older than her years to begin with, and time that seems to have stopped for her mind accelerates for her body, so that by the novella's surprising climax she is virtually a mature woman. The story has a horrible fascination on its surface level, familiar to anyone who has known bullying at school, and written with a remarkable empathy. But I suspect it may also be a parable for something else, perhaps the East German people under Communism; I don't know enough at first hand to be sure. This would certainly be in keeping with Erpenbeck's nightmare novella THE BOOK OF WORDS (2004). And certainly her magnificent recent novel VISITATION, much more lucid and less dark than these earlier explorations, where the passage of time and political power is indeed the main subject.