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.
