A SATISFYING CRIME NOVEL
translated from German, has won this year’s prestigious International Booker Prize.
Written by Jenny Erpenbeck it was translated into English by Michael Hofmann, who received half of the £50 000 (over R11 million) prize.
When a young student and an older, married man meet on a bus in East Berlin in 1986 they experience an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain.
When, however, she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power.
All this takes place against the backdrop of a world which is changing rapidly around them.
As the German Democratic Republic (GDR) begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
A meditation on hope and disappointment, poses complex questions about freedom, loyalty, love and power.
Speaking at the International Booker Prize awards ceremony at the Tate Modern in London on May 21, the chairperson of the judges, Eleanor Wachtel, said: “In luminous prose, Jenny Erpenbeck exposes the complexity of a relationship between a young student and a much older writer, tracking the daily tensions and reversals that mark their intimacy, staying close to the apartments, cafés, and city streets, workplaces and foods of East Berlin.
“It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture.
“The self-absorption of the lovers, their descent into a destructive vortex, remains connected to the larger history of East Germany during this period, often meeting history at odd angles.
“Michael Hofmann’s translation captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary.
“What makes so unusual is that it is both beautiful and uncomfortable, personal and political. Erpenbeck invites you to make the connection between these generation-defining political developments and a devastating, even brutal love affair, questioning the nature of destiny and agency. Like the GDR, it starts with optimism and trust, then unravels.”
Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin in 1967, is an opera director, playwright and award-winning novelist.
She first trained as a bookbinder and then worked as a theatre props manager before studying musical theatre direction and enjoying a successful career as an opera director from the late 1990s.
She published her debut novella,
in 1999. Susan Bernofsky’s English translation, was published in 2005.
Erpenbeck’s other works include The Book of Words (2008), Visitation (2010) and The End of Days (2014, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), and (2017, which was long-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2018), as well as Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections (2020).
Her work has been translated into over 30 languages, and it has been said that she is better known overseas than in her native Germany. In 2019, her novel
was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the newspaper in the United Kingdom. In the United States,
was long-listed for 2023’s National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Speaking about her book, Erpenbeck said: “It’s a private story of a big love and its decay, but it’s also a story of the dissolution of a whole political system. Simply put: How can something that seems right in the beginning, turn into something wrong?
“This transition interested me. It has a lot to do with language, since language is made to express feelings and visions as much as to hide or betray them. It can reveal something interior, and yet mislead people, or it can just be a blank surface.
“If you look at the details of what is spoken and where there’s silence instead, you’ll also be able to follow the invisible currents, the shifting power between generations, the techniques of manipulation and abuse.” Hofmann is a poet, reviewer and translator who has translated the works of several German authors, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Hans Fallada.
He is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1995 for the translation of his father’s novel,
Since 1993, he has held a part-time teaching position at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was also a judge for the International Booker Prize in 2018, the year Erpenbeck was first long-listed for the prize. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Hofmann said of “It’s a wonderfully circumstantial story in which the 10 years pre- and post-Mauerfall come into play.
“The book seems to me like a coin, which has a personal story – heads, as it were – on one side, and tails, the emblem of the state, on the other. It keeps being spun into the air, and it comes down heads, it comes down tails.”
This year’s International Booker Prize was judged by South African visual artist William Kentridge, Natalie Diaz, Eleanor Wachtel, Aaron Robertson and Romesh Gunesekera.
by Jenny Erpenbeck is published by Granta Books.
— Books Editor.
GASLIGHT FEMI KAYODE RAVEN BOOKS BOOK REVIEWER: MARGARET VON KLEMPERER
Femi Kayode is a Nigerian who trained as a psychologist before turning to writing. He lives in Namibia and this is his second novel after the acclaimed Both feature investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo. Gaslight canberead as a standalone although there are references to the earlier book.
Philip and his family are back in his home country of Nigeria after many years in America, and there are degrees of culture shock for all the Taiwos. But things seem to be going relatively smoothly until Philip’s sister gets him involved when the wife of the bishop of the charismatic church to which she belongs goes missing, and the bishop, to the horror of his faithful flock, is very publicly charged with her murder.
Despite his reservations about the church — Philip says he hovers between being a lapsed Christian and an agnostic — he checks the apparent crime scene, and forces the police to agree that it is all a set-up. But who has set it up?
Then the bishop’s wife is found genuinely dead and things begin to get very murky and complicated, and ultimately dangerous for Philip and his family. The more he discovers about the financial and moral shenanigans at the church, the more dangerous his situation becomes. Another body appears, an obvious warning to Philip not to meddle. Nothing and nobody is quite what they seem on the surface and it gets very hard to know who to trust, but Philip is determined to get to the bottom of the case.
To add to his problems, his daughter is having a hard time at school, and wants to go back “home” to America. The digressions into issues of racism in both America and Nigeria are cleverly handled and add another and appealing dimension to the novel. Philip is a likeable and believable narrator, a man of principle and one with very human doubts and concerns.
The reader has information that Philip doesn’t have. There are short sections throughout the book that are apparently in the voice of the bishop’s missing and ultimately dead wife. It all adds up to a complex and satisfying crime novel, with an attractive and rounded main character and a clever plot to unravel.