In one of the essays in the collection, Erpenbeck remarks that 'the word disappear has something active at its core,' that language itself contains the mechanisms for dematerialization and forgetting. Yet her own words are themselves a kind of bulwark ... They are her fragments, shored up against forgetting. And in reading, they become ours too.
Something like cultural rubble ... Erpenbeck’s deft, metaphorical ‘ostranenie’—the Russian formalists’ term for artistic ‘defamiliarization’—makes one think [further] ... If it at times seems slight or scattershot as a freestanding book, it slots nicely into an oeuvre that captures with startling lucidity a modernity characterized by unrest, upset, and dissolution.
The disappearing “things” in the title are not just objects, but all manner of entities and phenomena ... Another writer might have made their craft the protagonist of each piece, but Erpenbeck’s role in shaping the narrative stays largely implicit until a piece near the end ... Beals’s translation is elegant and well-judged, with particularly fine work on a couple of tricky rhymes.
Both peculiar and poetic ... 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.
