The End of Days

De: Jenny Erpenbeck

Narrado por: Lisa Flanagan

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books", each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. "How could it all have gone differently?" the narrator asks in the intermezzos.

The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early 20th-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there....

A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the 20th century.

©2012, 2014 Albrecht Knaus Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, München, Germany. Translation copyright by Susan Bernofsky (P)2019 New Directions Publishing Corp.

Sound and fury signifying nothing

This book was a nihilistic downer for me. Life just a bunch of churn and suffering amounting to nothing. I must be in the minority though on this per the stats.

This is a rare great book

The writer is brilliant and is willing to know what is unbearable to know about these times.

Nothing like the book description

After Book 1, this is nothing more than a series of disjointed statements that add up to nothing. There is no story, no point to any of these ravings. Just a mother who calls her daughter a whore and detailed descriptions of a daughter who goes out of her way to prove her mother right on this point.