The Lives of Others: A Review of Jenny Erpenbeck's 'Go Went Gone'

Description

Go Went Gone is hypersensitive to language as the material of its own construction, and it uses this self-awareness to explore the refugee crisis in Europe. Privilege is both its theme and narrative strategy, exposing how rarely written laws are “anchored in the emotional lives of the people”. Instead, the law creates borders — it is a border — less interested in whether refugees’ stories are true than whether European countries are “legally obligated to listen” to them.