The Book of Words

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By Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky

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Through their eyes and ears, even very young children can soak up far more than adults want to believe possible. Kids may not understand what it is they know, but they are aware something difficult has entered them, and they do their heroic best to assimilate the incomprehensible. "The Book of Words," a somber novella by the young German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, skillfully spirits readers into that exact osmosis: a child's confused apprehensions, when a placid surface cannot quite conceal accumulating clues of an unspeakable reality.

Narrated by the small daughter of a cold, distant mother and a father who is apparently a high-ranking official in the totalitarian regime of a nameless South American country, Erpenbeck's dream-like recitation takes readers on a journey of perception. The (unnamed) girl matures to the age of 17 in the course of this tale, whose text reports her sensing, witnessing and trying to make sense of disappearances - people and things targeted, a reader quickly gathers, by the all-consuming regime. Before the narrative is over, many familiars have gone missing, the actual identity of the girl's parents is disclosed, and readers learn (at unrelenting length and in nearly unbearable detail) precisely what has been going on.

Much of the story is delivered allusively, in a child's bright, dreamy language, repeating child-like thoughts - yet always attentive to perplexing evidence, determined to crack the mystery behind the bland masks worn by parents, visitors, wet-nurse, housekeeper, teachers, schoolmates. Erpenbeck begins quietly, interspersing a rhythm of nursery-singsong with sudden phrases hinting at terrifying particulars, smoothed over again with singsong.

"A ball is a thing that rolls and sometimes bounces. A father is a man who stays taller than you for a long time. [...] If a person wanted to play ball with someone's head, only the nose would get in the way. Before my father goes to confession, he takes me on his lap. ..."

A choreography of removal (that tactic used electrifyingly in the 1969 Costa-Gavras film "Z") drives Erpenbeck's docu-horror. She sketches a community whose features are comforting: a market selling fragrant produce, a cafe, shoe-repair shop, beauty salon; a music school where the girl takes piano lessons. Then those features vanish, one by one. Likewise, individuals:

"Those who, and then their friends, then the ones who remember them, then all who are afraid, and finally everyone. My father says these words behind a closed door in our house. [...] The next day day, hopping [...] across the city's stone carpet patterns [...] I count off silently: Those who. Then their friends. The ones who remember. Who are afraid."

Her schoolmate speaks of gunshots or bizarre accidents killing family members; of family members killing themselves. Rail travel is banned. On a bus, the child watches as a woman is seized by the hair and dragged screaming from the vehicle, after which the driver calmly starts the engine and moves on. Once home, the girl tells her father. "I see, my father says. Why do you think those men took the woman away, I ask my father. Jealousy, he says, betrayal, love - they must have had some reason. Do you think she's all right now? I'm sure she is, my father says."

Readers may recognize this juxtaposition of tones - the innocent quietude of a child's voice alongside its implied opposite, the scarcely screened-off murder, torture, mayhem - as a staple element of conventional horror films and literature. It remains potent across genres. A reader feels the temperature drop inside her own skin.

Translator Susan Bernofsky's thoughtful afterward provides helpful background. Born in East Berlin in 1967, Erpenbeck is the daughter of a writer and translator; she has written a book of stories called "The Old Child" (also translated by Bernofsky) and has worked on opera and musical productions. Among other insights, Bernofsky notes, "One of the many countries this parable might invite us to think of is the East Germany of Erpenbeck's childhood, where mysterious disappearances, interrogation and imprisonment were sometimes a part of life. [The] co-opting of language to frightening political ends underlies the book's nostalgia for a time when the words just meant what they meant."

"The Book of Words" is a furious testament, a cri de coeur made more cutting by its calm, glacial delivery. Erpenbeck's subject will tend to discourage critiques of this work's craft. Nonetheless, for me, while the novella's incantatory power is memorable, it runs punitively long (even at 93 pages), and its final third feels exhaustively redundant. The inevitable, practical challenge to writers of such work is a reader's capacity for moral response to sustained shock. (A related challenge faces anyone following world news.) On the other hand, one might reasonably argue that genocide and torture run too long and repetitively, as well.

Joan Frank is the North Bay author of the recent novels "The Great Far Away" and "Miss Kansas City," and the story collection "Boys Keep Being Born."



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/18/DDG5U864T.DTL


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This page contains a single entry by Marga Lacabe published on 19 de Enero 2008 4:55 PM.

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