December 2025

I heard Anand, a neurologist, speak on a panel entitled “The Brain’s Narrative: How Our Minds Make Sense of the World” at the Boston Book Festival recently. Anand introduced her comments about the mind and narrative by describing something from her clinical experience. On her first meeting with a patient suffering from some sort of memory loss, she begins by asking if she and the patient had ever met before. It’s not at all unusual, she said, for a patient to respond by saying something like “Oh, yes. We were childhood sweethearts.” The specific story isn’t the point — rather, it’s how the brain/mind puts together a narrative in which current experience might make sense.

I discovered Erpenbeck a couple of years ago when she won the International Booker for her book Kairos. I read that, and found it to be very powerful. More recently, I’ve read a couple of her essay collections. Some of those essays referred to people she interviewed as she was writing Go, Went, Gone, and reading her accounts of those interviews served as a good introduction to this novel. The novel is a powerful, if straightforward, account of the plight of African asylum seekers in Germany in the 2010s. This plight is a hard one, and not without its ironies – on one hand, they are forbidden from working; on the other hand, they are criticized by many for being lazy and dependent on government support.

Readers of the novel learn of the lives of these immigrants through the experience of a recently retired academic named Richard. Richard is focused on his new life in retirement, and at the beginning of the novel is struggling to develop a sense of who he is in this new life. But a news account of African immigrants staging a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation catches his interest. The news account piques his curiosity, and he takes on the task of learning more about these men as a research project, in much the same way that he would have approached a project in his work as a classics scholar.

However, the project very quickly becomes more intimate as he gets to know the men through their stories. As he becomes more and more involved in the lives of the men — going with them to meetings with government officials, helping them to learn German, connecting with some of them through music — he finds a human connection and through that connection a deeper sense of the person that he is.

Reading the novel now alongside the news accounts of the current brutal oppression of immigrants in the United States is painful; Erpenbeck’s novel reminds me that each of these people is a human being with needs and aspirations much like my own.

Coetzee, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, proposed to Dimópolos, his translator, that he write a book in English that she would then translate into Spanish. So far, a standard move. But he proposed also that the Spanish translation be published first and that it, rather than the original English, be the authoritative text used for the translation into other languages, including English. Ultimately, the publisher vetoed this idea, insisting that the original English must be the authoritative text. Despite the fact that Coetzee’s plan wasn’t realized, the experience did spark this fascinating dialogue about langauge and translation.

Coetzee and Dimópulos consider a range of questions: does language create the cultural world in which we live, or does it rather reflect a world that is already there? Would it be possible to create a universal language allowing a quick and easy translation between two existing languages, a universal language that in principle could replace all currently existing languages without any loss of meaning? What are we to make of the fact that some languages are gendered and others aren’t? In many languages, including German, French, and Spanish, nouns for both animate and inanimate entities are gendered. For example, Tisch, the German word for table, is masculine.

On the surface, this seems a relatively simple question with a relatively simple answer — when translating from German to English, merely disregard the fact that the German word for table is masculine. But Coetzee and Dimópulos point out that there are complications. For example, many speakers of English insist that we should give up some of our gender specifications because as a general rule the masculine form is the norm and the feminine form the exception. An example: the designation “the best poet of the late 20th century” could refer to a man or a woman, but “the best poetess of the late 20th century” can only be a woman. Or, to use an example I frequently brought up in class discussions, why is it that people sometimes refer to a “woman doctor” but never to a “man doctor”?

But Dimópulos points to something that I hadn’t considered. Someone whose birth language is gendered could see the English insistence that we give up gendered language as an instance of those who speak the dominant language forcing their views on those who speak the less dominant.

They both note that English is the dominant language; Coetzee points out that this dominance is not because people around the world are eager to read Shakespeare in the original English. Instead, he says, it’s primarily because English is the langauge of commerce.

But the dominance has implications beyond the financial:

…the volume of books translated into German is approximately five times greater than that of books translated into English in the United States…. Of those books translated into German, the great majority were originally written in English — for 2022, 60.4 percent were translated from English, followed by 12.2 percent from Japanese and 10.6 percent from French. … Of the total amount of books written in German language in Germany, only 4 percent were sold for English-translation rights (p. 86).

One might get the impression that those of us who speak and read English aren’t much interested in the writing of those who speak other languages.

This is a short book, and I read it rather quickly. But I’ll be thinking about the issues and questions it raises for much longer.