However, this title also suggests the experiences that several of the refugees relate to Richard: the departure from a homeland racked by war and poverty, the desperate and hazardous journey to Europe, and the eventual disappearance in a bureaucratic process that refuses to allow them to arrive officially in Germany. Now available in Susan Bernofsky's deft and supple translation, Go, Went, Gone alludes through its title's conjugations to the one activity that the German government sponsors for the refugees: language classes. In a work that is at once fiercely urgent and profoundly meditative, Erpenbeck underscores the central truth that the engagement with the Other inevitably entails a reckoning with the self. Her protagonist, Richard, a widower and retired classics professor, undertakes a project to interview refugees from Africa who have staged a hunger strike in Berlin to protest their legal limbo. In her latest novel, Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck, 2018 Puterbaugh Fellow, addresses the current refugee crisis that has had far-reaching political ramifications on both sides of the Atlantic.
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