The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Two ships lie in the harbour ... One of the two ships has just returned from a long voyage, the other is just preparing for a long voyage ... Jubilation and blessings accompany the ship as it sails off – while the arriving ship goes unremarked. But is it not this ship that deserves jubilation?
... The newly arrived ship lies safely in the harbour. But nothing is known of the one setting sail. What will be its fate? Who knows whether it will successfully withstand the storms awaiting it?”- The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there….

A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.

The End of Days is a novel I really, really wanted to like. It seemed smart and interesting and history-filled and just right up my alley as a whole, and I was excited to dive in.

The biggest problem The End of Days has is that the main character does not have a name. I do not have a problem with nameless main characters, in fact I usually end up liking stories with that trope, like The Road or most of Truman Capote's short stories. But in those books, it works because of either how few characters there are, or how little importance the narrator is to the story. In The Road, the man and his son are, for the most part, the only characters, so there's no risk of confusing them. In Breakfast at Tiffany's, the narrator is both unimportant to the story and also speaking in the first person, so his name never has any reason to come up. But in this, it is third person, there's a million characters, and many of them are women. For more than three quarters of this novel, I had no idea as to who was talking at any given moment, and the only character I could actually keep straight in my head was Sasha, because he had a name. The third book was what completely lost me; I don't even think the translator had any idea as to what in the hell was going on during that scene.

The writing was also very repetitive and not all that great, and it did have a very distinctive translated feel to it, thought I can't help but feel a little bad for the translator. If some scenes in this novel are half as confusing as they are in German, than she had her work cut out for her. I can tell that Erpenbeck was trying to go for a minimalist, Scandinavian style, as seen in books like Wolf Winter, but it doesn't really work because, again, of the constant and annoying repetition, which ruins actually quite good scenes, like in the first book, after the mother has lost her baby girl, and something along the same lines as this sentence pops up "...back when the girl was still a mother..." This is a poignant remark when it first appears, but it is repeated so many times through the story and is tailored to so many other characters it loses its poignancy and becomes grating instead.

That being said, I do love the idea of this novel. I love the idea of travelling a girl through time, through her many deaths, but the confusingness of the novel makes it hard to follow and even harder to like. And yet, despite my many complaints about the writing, I still want to read Visitation, because I love the idea behind that novel, too. I think I just really, really want to like this author even after this book being a complete miss.

 4.5 out of 10