Ever lose a sock, a key, a favorite book, maybe even an errant piece of cheese in the refrigerator? Ever wonder where they went? Jenny Erpenbeck, winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize for Kairos, creates a memory palace of evanescent imagination with suggested philosophical answers in the 31 delightfully ruminative flash essays in Things That Disappear, translated from the German by Kurt Beals. With nourishing and refreshing perspective, the brief meditations on the tangible and intangible coalesce into her observation that "the word disappear has something active at its core, that there is a perpetrator in the word who makes things that I know and cherish disappear."
The "things" in question include the former East German parliament building, once representing elegance and grandeur, now "basically made only of air"; a "one of a kind Biedermeier wardrobe" deposited as "bulky trash," the wood itself "a few grams lighter" like it has lost the weight of a vanished soul; as well as intangibles, like friendships gained, lost, perhaps invisible, or never really there in the first place. What happens to time itself, particularly that moment on New Year's Eve when "one number opens and another closes" connecting a global population? Wry melancholy permeates Erpenbeck's incisive prose and keen insights. Erpenbeck's lingering hope is that the single sock, the treasured book, even the lost cheese "plunges from a very high bridge and survives the fall" and "results in their appearance in another place." --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic.