When the refugees make a temporary move to an old-people’s home in his suburb, Richard decides to visit the facility and conduct some interviews. Curiosity and boredom combine to make him take the first step on a journey which will change his life. A recently retired widower, he’s a man with few demands on his time (and little idea how to spend it) now he’s left his classes and research behind, so when he sees a news story about the occupation by African refugees of Berlin’s Oranienplatz (on a day he actually passed through the square), he decides he wants to learn more. Richard, an emeritus professor and a classics expert, lives in a house by a lake in the suburbs of Berlin.

Instead, we have a fairly lengthy novel, focusing on one character whose struggles to face up to the prospect of a lonely old age are interrupted by encounters with people he never imagined he would cross paths with. Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen ( Go, Went, Gone) (review copy courtesy of Knaus Verlag) is the German writer’s first work of fiction since the IFFP-winning Aller Tage Abend ( The End of Days) and a slight departure from her best-known works, eschewing her trademark style of crafting a novel from thematically linked stories. Well, that’s the case with today’s book, with an old friend tackling a new subject at a time when the world is only too eager to find out what’s going on. While literary worth is important in selecting books to publish, topical relevance certainly does no harm, so when a book by a well-known, successful writer is about to come out, and the subject matter is suddenly, unexpectedly, all over the world news, any publicity person would have a field day.

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