The end of days
By: Jenny Erpenbeck ; translated by Susan Bernofsky
Contributors: Bernofsky, Susan, translator
Publisher: New Directions Books
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9780811221924
Subjects: Fiction; Death; History
Work titles: Aller Tage abend
Description: Consists essentially of five "books," each of which leads to a different death for an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp. She is spared in the next chapter with the help of someone's intervention and returns to Berlin to become a respected writer.
Notes: Translation from the German of: Aller Tage abend.