THINGS THAT DISAPPEAR

An ethereal collection of memories, delicately rendered before their inevitable crumbling away.

In 31 short vignettes, Erpenbeck (Kairos, 2023, etc.) grasps at hazy recollections that cumulatively form a body of work akin to an abstract mosaic. Each two-page section focuses on a particular fixation: One recalls construction at her son’s preschool, another celebrates prewar coal stoves, and another considers Berlin’s sanitation workers and the heirlooms they encounter while disposing of the city’s trash. An underlying sense of helplessness pervades as Erpenbeck attempts to concretize these recollections into something lasting. But “there’s so much to inherit these days,” she laments, “so many memories, it’s just too much to bear.” While some stories feel like futile attempts at archiving a personal history, others seek to accept the unavoidable losses of forgetting. “The farewells are what I remember,” she writes of the death of a loved one. On the disappearance of a friend’s ex-husband, “It remains astonishing that thin air can sometimes have just as much weight as something that is really there.” Writing about New Year’s Eve, she thinks of time moving “backward and forward” and wants to “believe in the ethereal web, the floating landscape of time, whose paths run between birthdays, weddings, deaths, and other anniversaries, instead of between houses.” One curious story mourns the bastardization of the traditional Splitterbrötchen pastry. Erpenbeck dreams up an argument with a baker (“No! The whole roll looked different, it wasn’t layered!”) before reaching an ominous meditation. “For the first time,” she writes, “it strikes me that the word disappear has something active at its core, that there is a perpetrator in the word who makes things I know and cherish disappear: Dismantle, discard, disband, disparage, discredit, disembowel, disuse.” Erpenbeck leaves it to her readers to assemble these enigmatic fragments into a meaningful whole. Those who indulge her idiosyncratic prose will be rewarded, finding in this slim book a wistful record of memory and loss.

Ephemeral musings, both peculiar and poetic.