The End of Days - Softcover

Erpenbeck, Jenny; Bernofsky, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811225135 ISBN 13: 9780811225137

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

Synopsis

The End of Days, a brilliant novel of contingency and fate, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of the same unnamed woman 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, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to 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 yet amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of twentieth-century German and German-Jewish history by "one of the finest, most exciting authors alive" (Michael Faber).

About this title

Review:

Dreamlike, almost incantatory prose.

The brutality of her subjects, combined with the fierce intelligence and tenderness at work behind her restrained, unvarnished prose, is overwhelming.--Nicole Krauss

Beautiful and ambitious. Erpenbeck's graceful prose suits the understated tone of this Hans Fallada Prize winner.

Words and stories and memory are the vehicle by which the reader moves, intoxicatingly and fearlessly, through a dizzying but magnificent series of terrains.--Michele Filgate

One of the finest, most exciting authors alive.--Michael Faber

About the Author:

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. New Directions publishes her books The Old Child & Other Stories, The Book of Words, and Visitation, which NPR called "a story of the century as seen by the objects we've known and lost along the way."

The translator of Yoko Tawada, Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser, among others, Susan Bernofsky is currently working on a biography of Walser.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0811225135
• ISBN 13: 9780811225137
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320