Download The Book of Words djvu

The world of The Book of Words is both a dreamworld of poetic fascination and a nightmare world that suddenly reveals itself as the narrator's attention shifts from, perhaps, a real present toward memories of a real but dreamlike past:

"I walk into my room and there she is standing at the window gazing at the mountain. I see Marie, and at the same time I look right through her at the mountain, and the mountain, for which the window-frame was always too tight a fit, now has plenty of room inside Marie's body. I pull a chair up the the table so she can sit down beside me, there's already a plate of cake there. Your housekeeper brought it for me, Marie says. But eating isn't so easy for me anymore, she says, and only now, when she turns around, do I see she no longer has any hands, they've been cut off just above the wrist."

The girl gazing out the window at the mountain, the mountain seen through the girl, the mountain too large for the window but comfortably framed within the girl's body--a succession of images consistent with certain surrealist artists' practices, both in poetry and in visual representations, and then the conventional moment--polite chat about a plate of cake explodes into the horror of the girl's missing hands. We learn bits and pieces of the background of this story, scattered through the pages of fragmentary and disjointed memories, presented in a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative that includes recurrent (some will say repetitive) phrases or whole sentences that crop up just as, in all our conscious self-narratives, certain images and ideas, words, phrases, pop up either as prompted by similar events or feelings, or seemingly inadvertently and out of place, but still comprehensible with some thought, maybe disturbingly tied to what otherwise seems an innocent or insignificant moment--making that moment humorous or portentous, grotesque, horrifying.

The poetic power of this passage is characteristic of the experience of Jenny Erpenbeck's brilliant novella, which begins with the narrator telling us that her eyes "see but see nothing," her ears "hear but hear nothing," and she must struggle to deal with "all this strangeness in my head." This narrator seems at first to be a troubled child ("Father and mother. Ball. Car. These might be the only words that were still intact when I learned them"), but as we readers allow this voice to enter, we realize that she is a timeless, ageless consciousness, often a small child perceiving a father who is "a man who stays taller than you for a long time," but always a mind talking to itself, telling itself the kinds of stories that we all tell ourselves about ourselves, though most of us are fortunate not to share the kinds of details this mind has to integrate into her stories about her own past.

Time passes as the narrative progresses, but it passes according to its own system of measurement, according to a calendar superposed to replace the "normal" calendar. The dislocations and contradictions--we are never sure where we are, what country (though it seems to be somewhere in South America in a country in decline, governed by increasingly desperate and ruthless dictators, who appear as dinner guests of the narrator's parents or as statues in a park) or what time period. These uncertainties contribute to the surreal and nightmarish qualities of the story which is told, however, in a nearly affectless tone by the voice who begins as a small girl, seems to mature to at least late adolescence, but who may be reconstituting her life story in this narrative from the perspective of an older woman attempting to understand the accumulated falsehoods and distortions--the betrayals of language and feeling and human decency--that make up her experiences during her childhood--experiences characterized by euphemisms and platitudes, easily seen through but hard to replace with any sense of clarity or understanding. We readers recognize the hints about the actual circumstances in the narrator's city--the disappearances, the tortures, the drastic measures, the decline of all services and amenities, even of basic necessities, the ability of her parents to accumulate to themselves and in their household all the "fine things" that are taken from those who either do not need them any more, did not deserve them in the first place, or simply are not around to take care of them or assert ownership

Other writers have used the device of presenting a story through the mind of a child or young person who sees and experiences, but is either too young to understand the implications or, as she grows older, is prevented by adults from drawing her own conclusions, developing her own understanding, of the "adult matters" that are concealed or distorted by euphemisms and outright lies. The consequent distortions of consciousness may well create the kind of surrealist nightmares that we find in this narrator's telling of her tale and of her rescue from, at least, the circumstances of it, if never from the memories, which gradually come into focus, though never become acceptable. We might think of Henry James's What Maisie Knew, or even Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. But seldom has an author captured the poetic power of a consciousness dealing with the eternal return of the almost musical phrases--even leitmotifs--of horror as effectively as Jenny Erpenbeck has done in this tiny but mesmerizing and unforgettable novella.

It should be said, in addition, that too often the translators into English of works in languages we readers may not know are left unmentioned. Not here. I have not seen the German text of Erpenbeck's novella, but I feel confident that Susan Bernofsky's translation has given us a faithful and impressive experience that must be comparable to the original work. She has captured the poetry and the horror with evident skill and artistry, and her work should be honored.

It may seem odd, even perverse, to encourage readers to enter a labyrinth of horrific experience, even filtered through a profoundly poetic sensibility, but this novella makes us mindful of the realities of lives lived under the power of vicious and murderous tyrants--men of impeccable manners, fine dressers and connoisseurs, who know how to deal with the question, "what to do with the material?" That there is no such simple answer as the one the narrator's father imposes is only one of the things we must learn from this powerful work.

Let me state my point of view right from the start: I think Jenny Erpenbeck may just well be one of the very finest writers at work today. Her book Visitation has lingered for months after reading it, and her earlier book, The Book of Words is spellbinding in its spareness and power.

The narrator, an unnamed little girl, relates the world around her in a prism of innocence. She attends school, goes on idyllic trip with her wet nurse although she's way past the age of breastfeeding, and lives in an unnamed country - presumably Argentina - where the sun seems to be eternally shining.

But read the words carefully and just about every single paragraph in this short 90-page book is underpinned with menace. "A ball is a thing that rolls and sometimes bounces. A father is a man who stays taller than you for a long time...If a person wants to play ball with someone's head, only the nose would get in the way."

As readers, we know that there are dark incidents happening right out of the periphery of the little girl's sight. Her wet nurse receives a "gift" of a box of hands. The gardener goes on a "vacation." And, when her father, a high-ranking government official, calmly reveals the secrets to his daughter, the effect is so chilling that it's almost hard to read the words...but at this point, the emotional investment in the book is so complete that it's equally difficult to draw away.

From the unnamed narrator: "Why does mankind have so many languages? I ask my father as we are walking back to his parent's house hand in hand after the service. So now can anyone just come and take a word away from the thing it belongs to..." Words - innocent, simple words - become fraught with sinister meaning: heat, cold, wet...hands, eyes, nose, mouth. People disappear and words no longer mean what they say.

The girl who has been meticulously instructed by her father to use words actually uses them in her own way to tell a different story: "Those who. Then their friends. Those who remember. Who are afraid. And finally everyone. Everyone everyone." Words are dropped, commas disappear, people vanish as well. Jenny Erpenbeck takes the words she explores and dissects to create another masterpiece.