An ethereal collection of memories, delicately rendered before their inevitable crumbling away.... A wistful record of memory and loss. Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic.
— Kirkus Reviews
An exciting new collection of autobiographical essays by Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize
The bestselling and award-winning German author Jenny Erpenbeck has gained international praise for her novels including Visitation, Kairos, and Go, Went, Gone. Things That Disappear is an exciting collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. 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.
An ethereal collection of memories, delicately rendered before their inevitable crumbling away.... A wistful record of memory and loss. Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic.
— Kirkus Reviews
With its philosophical observations about everyday life compressed into brief anecdotes, the feuilleton is a venerable literary form, practiced in Germany by the likes of Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer. Now available in English in Kurt Beals's translation, Things That Disappear shows Erpenbeck to be a worthy inheritor of this tradition.
— Ryan Ruby, The New York Times
Meditative, moving, and profoundly beautiful.
— Edmund de Waal
In these tender, poignant pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck is attuned to the silence left in the wake of an absence or disappearance. She captures the ineffable quality of memory with a quiet, haunting intensity, where a sentence or a paragraph can turn on a word and devastate.
— Mary Costello
Things That Disappear captures with startling lucidity a modernity characterized by unrest, upset, and dissolution.
— Philip Harris, The Cleveland Review of Books
She is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have—it’s no surprise that she is already bruited as a future Nobelist.
