Jenny Erpenbeck and Susan Bernofsky in The Book Of Words

The Book of Words
by Jenny Erpenbeck


Hardcover, 152 pages
Published 2007 by Portobello (first published 2004)
ISBN
184627057X (ISBN13: 9781846270574)
original title:
Wörterbuch

literary awards:
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Nominee (2009)

The narrator does not stay a young girl though at times it is hard to decipher. At one point I know she is seventeen, but it never feels that way. This makes her even more difficult to describe. But why should we? Isn't it enough just to enjoy the ramblings and the words? To feel discomfited by the insinuations the words imply? Is there any truth to any of this? I believe she is complicit in her love for her dad, and so are we in our love for her. And just because her mother likes to be tanned, tuned, and decorated does that make her all that bad? Or that her mother's father was himself a torturer and murderer who threw the little children up into the air and shot them dead?

THE BOOK OF WORDS by Jenny Erpenbeck was a surprise, a feast for my interest in things previously not privy to. I have a weak understanding of Nationalism, of dictatorships, brutality, and the strong arms controlling it. I do understand secrets and buggered tattle tales. I know there are bad people who would do us great harm if they had the power to do so. I know some fathers are not good people, that some mothers love and adore a delusion of themselves more than the welfare of their children. I know the time it takes to lose a hand or a head of hair. But what I don't get is the piano, the bones without flesh that turn into air, and women torn from the rear of unremarkable parked and idling buses.

The translator plays sometimes the most important role in an author's work. Translated from the German, Susan Bernofsky gives us an English work of amazing clarity. The gift she has in translating is for simplicity. For being clear. But all the time, through every page, there is this constant mystery. A tone that never changed. A little, but vastly important masterpiece. Unpretentious, and gifted in a very small frame.