"The End of the Day" Author: [Germany] Jenny Eppenbeck Publisher: Yunnan People's Publishing House

Introduction · · · · · ·
▲ Shortlisted works for the International Dublin Literary Award (2016)

▲ Hans Fallada Prize (2014), The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (2015), European Literature Prize (2015) Winning Works

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☄️ An epic story of one woman and an allegory of a country full of dark secrets: "How many more dangerous fronts are there in one's life? It is too hard to survive all the battles without collapsing."

☄️ After experiencing three empires, two world wars, five deaths, and four restarts, she realized at the end of her life that living was nothing more than letting two forces compete with each other in her, and letting the worst one lose in the end. "When all the stocks of life are used up, the indestructible reserve appears." - "The End of the Day"

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🌟 Introduction:

She was a baby girl who suffocated to death in the cradle; she spent her difficult girlhood in the dilapidated Vienna after the war; she awakened politically, devoted herself to the movement, and lost everything in the purge; she returned to East Germany, became a people's writer, and died suddenly at the peak of her discourse power; she lived to the age of ninety, lost her memory, and outside the nursing home was another country... She experienced three empires, two world wars, and five deaths, from the Jewish town in Galicia at the turn of the century, to Vienna after the First World War, Moscow during the Stalin era, and then to the reunified Berlin. Sometimes she was loved, sometimes she was betrayed, and sometimes she faded into history and was forgotten.

Each of the five volumes ends with her death, and each subsequent volume re-imagines what life might have been like if she had lived: a small baby grave that could have been as big as the Alps. What does the sum of all these "what ifs" mean in the seemingly inevitable momentum of history? Everything will eventually pass away, sentences will be burned to ash, footprints will disappear, and what will remain is the indestructible iron mark of a life.

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🌟 Comments and recommendations:

"In every respect, this extraordinary novel, The End of the Day, is an important work in recent European literature... In Erpenbeck's works, grand themes and detached style, world history and daily life, globality and locality are intertwined. This quality reaches its peak in The End of the Day and is presented in the most natural and convincing way." - Daniel Mendelsohn (famous literary critic, author of "Odyssey with My Father")

"The most outstanding and important German-language novelist of her generation... She uses calm, plain and poetic prose, whose steady rhythm hardly betrays the passion that drives it forward. This classical restraint is reminiscent of Coetzee and Naipaul." - James Wood (famous literary critic, author of "The Machine of Fiction")

“A work of formidable genius… a very German book, yet a perfectly European novel with a historical force. It is as light as a dream and as heavy as real life. Every German I have met in the past few months has asked me the same question: have you read The Day’s End?” —Eileen Batesby, The Irish Times

"Through words, stories, and memories, the reader is transported, intoxicated, and fearless, through a series of dizzying yet majestic terrains." -- Michelle Filgate, The Boston Globe

"One of the best and most exciting writers alive." --Michel Faber (famous novelist, author of "It Will Rain")