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Jenny Erpenbeck
Tand
(Trifles)
Eichborn, July 2001. 120pp. This collection of eleven short stories comes from the young author of the bestseller Geschichte vom alten Kind (Story of the Old Child); one of them, Sibirien (Siberia), was read at the Klagenfurt book festival in June and awarded second prize. The jury commented on Erpenbeck's ability to evoke a picture of post-war trauma within a microcosm. The narrator's father tells of how his mother returned, unbroken, from three years' exile in Siberia to find another woman living with her husband. The pieces range from just a few pages to longer and more elaborate narratives. In each story a female character speaks, or the narrator speaks for her, of her relationships with her female relatives, and with men, a father, brother or lover. Each story may be read independently, but the volume is best appreciated as a whole in which one narrative fills out and complements the rest. Each points beyond itself and becomes part of a meditation on the vagaries of female existence in the modern world. This is executed in a manner that has nothing to do with the recent wave of 'women's writing', in both English and German, about 'thirty-something' single women. What links the stories is not so much shared themes - although passivity, submissiveness, inequality of power, and psychological and sexual abuse feature throughout - as mood. Erpenbeck is adept at understatement, her style is economical and free of judgement or partisanship - this makes some depictions of abuse all the more shocking. In the opening story of the collection, for example, Im Halbschatten meines Schädels ('In the half-shadow of my skull') a woman in a disturbing ménage à trois is abused by both husband and wife, but hardly seems to register the abuse.
Erpenbeck offers no clichés, no happy endings or easy solutions, and yet these pieces are extremely readable and thoroughly engaging. Her style, for all its reticences - or perhaps even because of them - is powerful, and her themes are universal and incisively portrayed.
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