Book description
Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, "one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation" (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a…
Why read it?
3 authors picked Go, Went, Gone as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This quiet, unsettling book was written over a decade ago but still feels so topical and urgent that it might have been published today. In a German city, dozens of African migrants living on the street stage a hunger strike for the right to work. Richard, a widowed academic in bored retirement goes to meet them, and gets involved.
I recalled my own impulses to activism and charity as a kid and now— my curiosity to understand other people's plight, compulsion to help, and perhaps guilt that, in comparison, my own problems are negligible.
Richard is motivated by morality, a…
From Jonathan's list on conflicted recent history and coming dystopia.
This book transported me to the Berlin of today, where desperate immigrants are struggling to find a way to live.
It put me alongside a retired professor (which I am) who slowly comes to know some of these African men and who tries to help them and to make their lives easier, and in the process, realizes that his life as a widower and as someone no longer with a job or a title still can have enormous meaning for him and for others.
It is a book about the world outside of books and how people can endeavor to…
This is a beautiful book about a retired academic and widower who finds himself embroiled in the lives of young African refugees trying to seek asylum in Berlin. What I love about this book, besides the beautiful writing, is that neither the widower nor the refugees are portrayed as saints and neither really finds redemption. It is, rather, a very real story of fragile yet real connections between people who, for entirely different reasons, are very much alone. I love this book because it holds us all accountable as human beings and asks us how we can retain our humanity,…
From Anne's list on looking for and finding refuge.
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