Go Went Gone is a quietly compelling, quietly devastating story that speaks to our moment, globally and locally its characters are complex its rhythm is thoughtful.

From this position of embodied privilege, Erpenbeck explores the possibility of an ethical and empathetic encounter with the “emotional lives” of others, those the law fails to see or hear. Not its final destination, but its most honest portal for a white German author like Erpenbeck imagining the violence of exclusion suffered by the men from Oranienplatz: exclusion from working, shelter, papers from language itself. As the embodiment of economic, racial, and linguistic privilege, he operates as the novel’s gateway. Who better to drive the narrative, then, but Richard: a retired, white, German, Professor Emeritus of Classical Languages. What are the ethics of telling others’ stories? What are the ethics of not telling these stories, when language itself is the obstacle? What are the ethics of telling others’ stories? What are the ethics of not telling these stories, when language itself is the obstacle? Language, the novel argues in its story and its structure, is also the bridge. In this crisis - where at least in principle, asylum cases pivot on the ability to tell a compelling story - the novel asks urgent questions. Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky and set in Berlin, it is haunted as much by the ghosts of that city’s divided, war-torn/wall-torn past as by the crowds of refugees camped in its freezing present, in Oranienplatz. Instead, the law creates borders - it is a border - less interested in whether refugees’ stories are true than whether European countries are “legally obligated to listen” to them.īorders, gates, and bridges spring up everywhere in the novel. Privilege is both its theme and narrative strategy, exposing how rarely written laws are “anchored in the emotional lives of the people”. Go Went Gone is hypersensitive to language as the material of its own construction, and it uses this self-awareness to explore the refugee crisis in Europe.

I left court that day with a clear thought: the law is its own language. Or maybe no one had a language that allowed them to hear it. Instead, I felt a tightening of the chest bitterness: she was doing a great job translating words, but it felt like no one was telling the story that mattered. The interpreter’s arrival didn’t bring clarity. Does it matter where you read a book? I was reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone in a court waiting room, where my friend’s asylum case had been adjourned (again) until the interpreter showed up.

Go went gone