Review: The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck

title:  The Old Child & Other Stories  [purchase here]

author:  Jenny Erpenbeck

translated from German by: Susan Bernofsky

genre:  novella, short stories

pages: 120

published: 2005 (translation date)

source:  New York Public Library

"The girl used to be constantly looking around to the right and left to be sure of doing whatever the right thing was, but now that she can see more clearly and perceives the great variety of human beings moving all around her in a thousand different ways, she can no longer choose what is right, she no longer knows what the right thing is.  Everything she does seems to her wrong even while she is doing it, so utterly wrong that she'd like to take it back again--never would she have wished to offer offense to anyone, but now she is forced to realize that there is virtually no action at all that is free of the possibility of causing offense.  At the same time, this state of being prevented from acting cannot merely be described as a lack of independence, as is so often done by the girl's teachers with pedagogical intent, it is more like a paralysis.  Even transforming a simple thought into action, such as, for example, wanting to lift one's hand, is becoming more and more impossible for the girl the longer she remains in the institution.  If you lift your hand, you must, a moment before, have wanted to lift your hand, if you laugh, you must have wanted to laugh, if you say no or yes, you must have wanted to say no or yes, in other words every time you do something, you must have wanted, a moment earlier, to do what you are doing.  The moment you do anything at all, your volition can be seen standing naked behind it, and this the girl finds so utterly embarrassing that she chooses to want nothing.  She wants what all the others want, but there is no such thing.  And the moment she realizes this, she realizes also that her strength is waning."  (p. 65, The Old Child).

If Melissa Pritchard, Anne Carson and Herta Müller could somehow procreate, their child's writing might sound like Jenny Erpenbeck, which in my book is a wholehearted compliment.  

In this collection of short stories and a novella, Erpenbeck's characters are hauntingly memorable and scenes vividly dreamlike.  

The title novella, The Old Child, tells the story of a young girl, found  standing in the street, devoid of memory, with an empty bucket in her hand.  The girl is then taken by the authorities to an children's institution where all possessions are communal, and she finds comfort in the anonymity of routine and procedure.  Throughout the novella, the reader watches the girl gain, then lose, discover then reject parts of her authentic self as she struggles to find her place among the other children.  The telling of the story was so nuanced and the character of the girl so complex...I have a feeling I'll discover something new with each reading, which is the mark of true craftsmanship on the part of Erpenbeck.  I keep coming across the phrase "verbal economy" associated with Erpenbeck's writing, and it's an apt one; what she is able to accomplish in 120 pages, lesser authors spend 300+ pages attempting.  

Other highlights:

Hale and Hallowed:  The story of a woman who pays an unexpected nighttime visit to the woman she shared a hospital room with at the birth of her son, and the pace/cadence of this story was phenomenal.  

Light a Fire or Leave: Erpenbeck is supremely skilled at dropping right in to the core of the matter in a way that just reverberates for the rest of the story.  The first few lines: "That I was going to die, this I always knew.  Already at ten, at twelve, I could see myself lying there: in the deepest forest, in a puddle, unburied, my body a home to vermin.  What I didn't know is that I could grow old.  My life seemed to me only a rough draft, a sketch to which I could keep applying the eraser, it seemed to me I was simultaneously at home in all my ages, I saw the phases of my life sitting in a circle around Death, the way the twelve months in the fairy tale sit around the fire.  I never believed age could really drive two people apart, I thought everyone knew everything at all times, and the only difference was in the concrete shapes this knowledge assumed.  I always felt I had plenty of time."  (page 117).  

Rubric rating:  9.  Reading this collection was like taking a master class.  Erpenbeck is ridiculously talented and I'm absolutely going to read everything of hers I can get my hands on, such as Visitation and The Book of Words.

Update:  I've now finished 5 of the 30 titles (25 to go!) on my 30-before-30 literary bucket list, with a few more in progress.

Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff  (in progress)
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta    (in progress)  
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **   (in progress) 
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck (review coming soon!!!!!!!)

Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell 
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading

30 before 30!

A week or so ago, I turned the big 2-9, and given that I only have just under 360 days left in my 20s, I'm putting together a literary bucket list of sorts:  My 30 before 30.  This is comprised of books I've either been dying to read, should have read by this point, or want to revisit with the perspective of age.


Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck
Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading


Of course I'll supplement with my typical diet of new releases and review all along the way.  Looking forward to getting started!!!

Review: The Odditorium by Melissa Pritchard

title:  The Odditorium  [purchase here]

author: Melissa Pritchard

genre: short stories

pages: 252

source:  I received an Advanced Reader's Copy from Bellevue Literary Press 

in exchange for an honest review.

Melissa Pritchard has some legit authorial street cred.  Thus far, her short fiction has won:

• the Flannery O'Connor Award,
•  the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, 
• the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize,
• a PEN/Nelson Algren Honorary Mention
• TWO O. Henry Prizes,
• TWO Pushcart Prizes,
• the Ortese Prize in North American Literature from the University of Florence,
• the Barnes & Noble Discover Award,
• fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hawthorne Foundation of Scotland, the Bogliasco Foundation of Italy, and the Howard Foundation at Brown University

AND she's been chosen for NPR's Summer Reading List AND her work has been anthologized many times over.

To say Pritchard was immensely talented would be a careless understatement.

Now, I usually grab short story collections as my subway reading.  I like the feeling of accomplishment I get from being able to finish a short story or two while crushed against complete strangers during my commute. 

 (sidebar the first:  did anyone else die laughing watching Liz Lemon's morning commute on 30 Rock a few weeks ago?  For those of you who don't live in New York, that was not at all exaggeration for comedy's sake.  That was EXACTLY what Newt Gingrich's "elite" New Yorkers face between the hours of 8-10am and 4:30-7:30pm EVERY SINGLE DAY.  Which is probably why we New Yorkers have the reputation of being a bit cranky.  The only thing missing from 30 Rock's vignette was the smell. When you're smashed against multiple people in several compromising positions, there's inevitably someone in close proximity who does not believe in deodorant.  Or likes to pile on the perfume/cologne.  Or who hasn't bathed in several moons.  Or probably should see a physician re: what is making their feet smell like moldy cheese.  Or all of the above.  sidebar the second:  perhaps I hold a grudge for an excessively long time, but I'm still in awe of how out of touch Newt Gingrich's comment about "elite" New Yorkers ride the subway.  In my job, when I'm out working with schools, I ride the subway all day.  I would like to personally invite Newt to commute with me for a day, on my dime, and then ask him how "elite" he feels....might also impact his stance on public school education...two birds, one stone. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...)

However, this is not the ideal collection for short bursts of reading, because Pritchard is one of those amazingly rare contemporary authors whose prose is so lyrical and so thought-provoking that you're going to want a nice window of quiet time to savor it, like a well poured glass of Malbec on a chilly November evening.  (Also, any author who can use the descriptor "labial pink" in a story without it feeling as tawdry as a bodice rippers' various "throbbing members" is truly a master of their craft). Each story in her collection defies the notion of genre, and as uniquely structured as each piece is, as a whole they form a coherent and well curated collection.

A couple highlights:

Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Medical Hospital:  My absolute favorite in the collection, this story focuses on Captain Brown, poetry enthusiast who's somewhat incongruous to what one typically pictures as a military commander, as he takes command of the Royal Victoria Medical Hospital post D-Day.  The descriptions of the hospital itself are as haunting as many of the images and characters Pritchard conjures.  A highlight of the collection.

Ecorché: Flayed Man: This story felt a bit like the love child of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence and anything by the Marquise de Sade.  It follows the crucial players who, while performing their collective tasks of "Collector," "Director" and "Anatomist," work to create and maintain 1798's version of the Bodies exhibit.  I admire Pritchard's graphic and lyrical yet concise language as she describes the various exhibits and the men who maintain them.

Rubric rating: 8.5.  One of the most unique collections I've read in ages.  I can't add her to my "personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers" YET, but I have a feeling once I read more of her work, that's where she'll end up.

PS Check out this piece of marketing genius from Bellevue Literary Press: