Go, Went, Gone

Reviews

"A retired widower and classics professor takes an interest in African migrants staging a hunger strike in Berlin and finds himself tumbling into a world of harrowing stories and men who share a common sense of loss." — Boston Globe

"This brilliantly understated novel traces with uncommon delicacy and depth the interior transformation of a retired German classicist named Richard. Erpenbeck possesses an uncanny ability to portray the mundane interactions and routines that compose everyday life, which she elevates into an intimately moving meditation on one of the great issues of our times. Her economical prose lends existential significance to the most commonplace conversations, defined less by what they include than by what they omit." — Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs

"The plight of asylum seekers as told through a retired university professor...Very moving." — Carol Morely, Guardian

"Beautifully haunting." — Interview Magazine

"This timely novel brings together a retired classics professor in Berlin and a group of African refugees. The risk of didacticism is high, but the book’s rigor and crystalline insights pay off, aesthetically and morally." — The New York Times

"A highly sophisticated work." — Kate Web, The Spectator

"Calls to mind J.M. Coetzee, whose flat, affectless prose wrests coherence from immense social turmoil. By making the predicament of the refugee banal and quotidian, Erpenbeck helps it become visible." — Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"The best novel to date about the migration refugee crisis, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (New Directions) felt both urgent and tender, taking on depicting Europe on the brink of its next profound change—as seen through the eyes of a professor from Berlin’s former East, a man who knows something of what it means to lose one’s place in the world." — Megan O'Grady, Vogue

"Erpenbeck’s prose, intense and fluent, is luminously translated by Susan Bernofsky." — James Wood, The New Yorker

"Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating, ferocious as well as virtuosic." — Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books

"This new novel by the author of The End of Days and Visitation is full of departures and disappearances. It is both a gripping story about the life of the modern migrant and a meditation on how we all find meaning in life." — The Guardian

"Erpenbeck works with a dramatist’s impulse to extremes and a composer’s ear for the resonant phrase. She can catch a murmur on the air and send it echoing up and down a hundred tormented years. Go, Went, Gone tackles an issue that’s made headlines—namely, the plight of African refugees in Europe. It clearly engaged this author like nothing before. A fresh career benchmark." — Bookforum

"Erpenbeck is scathing about the absurdities of a nightmarish bureaucracy that appears to deliberately wrongfoot refugees. Deceptively unhurried, yet undeniably urgent, this is Erpenbeck’s most significant work to date." — Financial Times

"Dreamlike, almost incantatory prose." — Vogue

"Acclaimed German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck has gone further than most in examining the ephemeral nature of human life. A heart-rending plea for universal tolerance and respect." — Anthony McGowan, The Big Issue

"An extraordinary novel, bearing unflinching testament to history as it unfolds." — Neel Mukherjee, The New Statesmen

"A nuanced depiction of people who have largely given up the luxury of hope and have little to do but wait. Erpenbeck bluntly reminds readers what is at stake for Germany and, by extension, the world. A timely, informed, and moving novel of political fury." — Brendan Driscoll, Book List