Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck review – a kaleidoscopic study of transience

A collection of columns by the German Booker winner reveals a keen eye for details that mark the passing of time

Jenny Erpenbeck wrote the pieces collected in this compact yet kaleidoscopic book for a column in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; published in German in 2009, they now appear in an English translation by Kurt Beals, following the immense success of Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, which won the 2024 International Booker prize.

It’s interesting and instructive to reflect on what German newspaper readers made of the column in the early years of the new millennium, nearly two decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall. For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form – apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrötchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for& a more elaborate and wealthy clientele – she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.