January 3, 2008
Review of Jenny Erpenbeck's The Book of Words
My brief review of Jenny Erpenbeck's newly translated novel, The Book of Words (New Directions), has just appeared in the Village Voice. Here is the beginning:
Jenny Erpenbeck's The Book of Words derives much of its potency from the naïveté of its young, unnamed female narrator. In an unidentified South American country governed by a brutal regime, our guileless guide lives a cloistered life, shuttling between a well-appointed home and a walled-in private school. Gunshots heard from the playground are interpreted whimsically by classmates; concern about a woman dragged from a bus by her hair is shushed away by consoling parents. Like "The Old Child," the title piece of this German author's 1999 debut collection (published in English in 2005), The Book of Words effortlessly weaves together the quotidian and the horrific in paragraph-long vignettes.
To read the rest, click here.