The Old Child & Other Stories

Sparse, engaging fiction by one of Germany's most original young writers. <BR>"The Old Child & Other Stories" introduces in English one of Germany's most original and brilliant young authors, Jenny Erpenbeck. Written in spare, highly concentrated language, "a sustained feat of verbal economy" ("Die Zeit"), the one novella and four stories in "The Old Child" go beyond the limits of the expected, the real. Dark, serious, often mystical, these marvelous fictions about women's lives provide glimpses into the minds of outcasts and eccentrics, at the same time bearing out Dostoevsky's comment that hope can be found so long as a man can see even a tiny view of the sky. The parable-like novella "The Old Child" describes a girl's mind as seemingly blank: picked up off the street with no discoverable past, she is taken to a children's home where she discovers she can "succeed by her silence." Another story, "In the Penumbra of My Skull," tells of a girl lying sick in a room covered with rugs and tended by her lover's wife." In "Hale and Hallowed," a woman pays a surprise nighttime visit to the woman with whom she shared a hospital room when their two sons were born. Dark, revelatory, ultimately redemptive (though barely in some cases), these stories bear out Ira Panic's comment that "Erpenbeck's writing is so concentrated, so dense, that a slim volume of stories packs the weight of the world."

"This enigmatic collection by East Berlin — born Erpenbeck explores entwined personal and political histories through the literal loss of memory. In the title story, a 75-page novella, an adolescent-looking female amnesiac is taken off the streets and into a Dresden home for children. As the story unfolds, there are signs that the girl, a metaphorical East Germany, may not be so young after all, and that her attempts to freeze herself in time, and to forget, are failing. In the exquisitely moving 'Sand,' a girl watches as her aging grandmother becomes frail and strange, inhabited by youthful laughter that, the girl realizes, 'must be her own laughter that has returned to her like a lost daughter.' 'Hale and Hearty' tells the story of Maria Kainbacher, who looks up a friend from 50 years before and, by voicing their shared experiences, jolts Gertrud into vivid recollections (which Erpenbeck then wrenches to a tritely abrupt conclusion). Dark and cryptic, the stories are too diffuse in their language and plot to approach the Grimm-like precision they seem to aim for, but they provide a window into a post-1989 European political unconscious that continues to take shape." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)