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Not now Yes please
Voices Comment Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015: Winner Jenny Erpenbeck’s historical novel grips and dazzles Poetic, gripping, visionary, this is a novel that will surely stand the test of time
Alternative futures build into a chronicle of chance
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Jenny Erpenbeck writes historical fiction but not in the way that traditionalists will expect.
The End of Days , which in its brilliant translation by Susan Bernofsky has won this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, tells one woman’s story of survival and reinvention across a Europe wracked by war, revolution and repression, from the Habsburg Empire in the 1900s to eastern Germany after the Wall’s fall.
This is no plodding, conventional saga, though, but a dazzling succession of make-or-break scenes. Each section turns on a crisis that could have ended the heroine’s progress for good. Alternative futures build into a chronicle of chance and change, personal and historical, lit by flashes of prose lightning. We sense world-shaking events on the pulse of a private life as she dodges the bullet of fate only to fall into yet another existential challenge. Poetic, gripping, visionary, this is a novel that will surely stand the test of time.
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