The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

If she'd gone downstairs just five minutes later, she'd have missed the entrance to the underworld, which would have trundled on its way, offering its open hole to someone else instead; or if she'd taken that step with her right foot instead of her left, she wouldn't have lost her footing; or if she'd been thinking not about this and that but about that and this, she'd have seen the steps instead of not seeing them. Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later. Some entrance will have to be for her. Every last person, every he and every she, has an entrance meant for him, for her. So does this underworld consist only of holes? Is there nothing more to it? A different wind is blowing here. Is there nothing that could prevent a person from--sooner or later, here or there--stumbling right into it, flailing, falling, plummeting, sinking?

I started reading The End of Days just as some discourse was brewing about Hamnet on the internet: so-and-so said it was manipulative, another so-and-so defended it as an accurate picture of the grief of losing a child. Of course it's emotionally intense, the argument goes, losing a child is like that. I was thinking about as I read the first of five sections in Erpenbeck's novel, about a young woman in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire who loses an infant child only a few days old. It's heartrending, and it struck me as utterly profound and sincere in the way that grief seems to gather in objects--the cradle, the sheet over the mirror, the everyday stuff of life transmogrified by grief into something else, yet remaining stubbornly itself. And in defense of Hamnet, which is not really what I want to write about, its best moments are reminiscent of that--empty rooms that were previously filled with life. The family in The End of Days falls summarily apart; the husband leaves, and the tensions grow between the mother, who is now only "daughter" again (wow) and her own mother, who is no longer "grandmother." And then the chapter closes, and the "Intermezzo" comes, and the child is revived: what if, Erpenbeck asks, the mother had reached out and simply placed a handful of cooling snow on the child?

In the second section, the infant of the first section gets a chance to grow up, but death is still waiting for her. In this section she will die as a teenager (bruised by love and entering into a misbegotten pact with another, equally bruised young man), but the intermezzo will come and revive her again. The novel's five sections go on like that, imagining the woman's next death: killed in Moscow by Soviet agents who suspect her for a German spy; falling down the stairs in her early old age; and finally, in a nursing home, well into her 90's. The point of this is all almost stupidly clear, but Erpenbeck says it so well: "Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death." And so it is for all of us. We know this, of course, but we don't like to be reminded of it. And yet I can think of few books who so profoundly confront us with an obvious truth we already know, and so profoundly.

One thing that really impressed me about The End of Days is the way that Erpenbeck makes each section self-contained, and yet somehow, part of the whole. Each section is narratively and, to some extent, stylistically different, and each contains its own fully developed elements while containing also threads that unite the whole. I enjoyed, for example, the satirical bent of the third section, which sees the woman feverishly writing down a defense of her activity in the Communist Party. In this section, everyone is described by initial, as in "Comrade O." or "Comrade Schu." or "Comrade H.," as one might find in the byzantine sectarian squabbling of the time. The fourth section is probably the weakest, though Erpenbeck writes about falling as a symbol quite stunningly. The fifth captures the now-old woman's weakening intellect, and the way that time might seem to unravel or deform for a senile person, in a really effective way.

And when taken as a whole, the stories tell a fascinating historical narrative, too, about the fall of European empire, the cataclysm of war, and the rise of Communism. We know, fascinatingly, that the protagonist's mother is Jewish but has hidden it when marrying the protagonist's father. This information becomes hidden even to herself, and we are permitted to know also that her grandfather died brutally, attacked by his own fellow villagers in a fit of violent anti-Semitism. This information is hidden from the protagonist's mother until she loses her child; of course, when the story is revised and the child revived to become the protagonist, that information never gets shared--but it hangs like a pall over the rest of the book. It's a subtle masterstroke in a novel that's full of them, and I have to admit that The End of Days really blew me away.