Jenny Erpenbeck: 'What you write down can be made to hide something'

Fictionable

Spring has finally sprung and with it another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Jakub Żulczyk, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. But we launch into Spring with Jenny Erpenbeck and her haunting short story Sloughing Off One Skin.

When we spoke down the line from Berlin, Erpenbeck began by reading from the opening of the story in German as well as in Michael Hofmann's supple translation. Sloughing Off One Skin is set in motion by a piece of paper – a false passport – and Erpenbeck admits she's always been "suspicious of documents".

"Paper is not just paper," she says, adding that it's "a surface, and under the surface things can happen. They are shifting, they are moving. The surface stays unmoved."

Erpenbeck explains how Sloughing Off One Skin ends with a spooky coincidence drawn from life – "in a way this is a ghost story" – and confesses she struggled with the ending for her novel of the refugee crisis, Go, Went, Gone.

"I couldn’t see any kind of end to the story," she says, "and so I thought I’ll write down a solution that obviously is no solution, so that readers can understand there is something left to do."

Borders loom over Erpenbeck's latest novel Kairos as well, which charts the dissolution of the border between East and West Germany in 1989. The author recalls the strange dislocations of changing countries while remaining in one place. "Outside became inside, or our outside wasn’t there any more."

Erpenbeck adds that she has a "strong connection" with questions of memory and "how times are interwoven with each other".

"I wanted to become an archaeologist when I was young," she says, "so I’m still digging."

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