The inability which he now has to share his work with his peers, and with the wider community, saddens him: ‘As it is, everything his wife always referred to as his stuff now exists for his pleasure alone. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?’ His existence, rather than peopled with daily interactions with students and other members of staff, suddenly feels suffused with loneliness. his head still works just the same as before. The story begins on the first day of Richard’s retirement, in which he finds himself cast rather adrift: ‘He doesn’t know how long it’ll take him to get used to having time. Early on in the novel, he finds ‘a surprising new community on Oranienplatz – among the African asylum seekers who have set up a tent city there.’ As Richard slowly gets to know them, his life starts to change, and his own sense of belonging is thrown into question.

The novel’s protagonist is a retired University professor of Classical Philology named Richard, a man who has lived alone in Berlin since the death of his wife. It has been translated into English by Susan Bernofsky. Sally Rooney has called it ‘vital’, and The Guardian ‘profound’. Go, Went, Gone was also longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. I was therefore looking forward to dipping into this novel, which is the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the English PEN Award. I have read all of her other books which have been translated into English thus far, and find them all wonderfully strange, and highly memorable.

Go, Went, Gone by German author Jenny Erpenbeck was my book club’s choice for January.

Go went gone by jenny erpenbeck