Love at the ends of the earth
Reviewed: Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck, New Directions At the start of the first essay in her 2018 collection Not a Novel, Jenny Erpenbeck observes: ‘There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth.’ For her, that was a street in East Berlin around the corner from the Wall. From her apartment on the thirteenth floor, she could watch the double-decker buses, which at the time only existed in the West. In her telling, it was a happy childhood. Later in the collection, reflecting on the common critique of East Germany as ‘gray’, […]