Kate Webb

A friend in need

Her thoughtful Go Went Gone sees the plight of refugees through the imaginative eyes of a retired academic in Berlin

issue 20 January 2018

The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and the autumnal tone of its beginning — a classics professor retires, leaving him at home raking leaves, mulling over memories of his wife and wondering about the body in a nearby lake — suggests that this will be a book of endings, something akin to Anita Brookner’s stories of self-absorbed people in the twilight of their lives.

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