Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days was published one year before Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, but it wasn’t published in English until 2014. The two are inevitably going to be compared to each other because they so similar in content and style. Both novels tell the stories of how the arc of a life depends on chance events. The protagonists of both books are born or not-born, live, and die over and over according to the vagaries of day-to-day life. The End of Days, however, is a much more elusive novel. The protagonist is only known as Comrade H. or Frau Hoffman and we don’t learn nearly as much about her as we learn about Ursula Todd, the protagonists of Life After Life. Comrade H.’s story and the story of the twentieth century mirror each other, like Ursula’s was, but written in such a way that H.’s story could have the story of any woman born at the beginning of the century and lived through decades of European upheaval...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.