Junk by Jenny Erpenbeck

 

Illustration by Damien Cuypers

FICTION

Junk

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Translated by 

Kurt Beals

OF COURSE IT’S NICE when the eye can be at peace, when it doesn’t get tangled up in knickknacks, when the drawers open silently and then close again as if by magic. It’s nice to have bare tables where no dust falls, only light. It’s nice when everything is made of glass and you can see through it, because nothing else is there. Emptiness is nice. Who doesn’t like to make a purchase if the salesman places a single pair of trousers on a frosted glass countertop lit from below? Then those trousers are the last thing on earth that casts a shadow, and the counter with its bluish shimmer turns out to be an altar that extends from Berlin to Vienna, from Vienna to Tokyo, from Tokyo to New York, and from New York perhaps to heaven or hell, gradually narrowing as it disappears from view.

 

Review

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck review – a monumental breakup

Five of the best translated novels of 2023

This article is more than 2 years old

The contours of a relationship are echoed by the collapse of East Germany in this invigorating novel of lost love

Natasha Walter

Thursday 8 June 2023

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she finally sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air.

 

Review

Five of the best translated novels of 2023

This article is more than 1 year old

Javier Marías’s final book, a love affair in 1980s East Berlin, reincarnation in France, a story of obsession and a South Korean romp

John Self
Friday 8 December 2023

Tomás Levinson
Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Hamish Hamilton)
“I was brought up in the old-fashioned way, and could never have dreamed that one day I would be ordered to kill a woman.” Ah, how we will miss the late Javier Marías and his unique genre of slow-motion page-turners, blending thrillery plots with long, equivocating sentences. His final work, a “companion novel” to its predecessor, Berta Isla, tells the story of a washed-up spy chasing down a terrorist, and is full of the complexities, comedy and most of all contradictions that define his work. Fittingly, its closing words are “Possibly. You never know.”

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker prize

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck wins International Booker prize 

Erpenbeck is the first German writer and Michael Hofmann the first male translator to win the £50,000 prize for novel which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany

Ella Creamer

Tuesday 31 May 2024

Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel Kairos, translated by Hofmann from German.