4.5/5 stars
Recommended for people who like: fiction, current events, unlikable main characters, slice of life, character growth
I will say, even after finishing the book and seeing how he grows, I still don't like Richard as a character. Not entirely. I like some of his actions and I greatly appreciate his character growth, but I dislike some of his other actions and question some of his motives. Nevertheless, I still thought the story was good so I only docked 0.5 stars for Richard.
The book focuses on Richard, who is/has recently retired from his academic position and is essentially lacking in things to do with his time. While he’s coming back home one day, he sees the sit-in occurring at Alexanderplatz and becomes curious. The summary for the book definitely doesn’t touch on the fact that Richard becomes interested in the refugees and their plight largely because he has nothing else to do. It does feel mostly like a slice-of-life book, but there are several ‘mini-plots’ throughout the book that keep things going and the other characters are interesting enough that I think it makes up for the general overall lack of a plot. Plus, the ending third of the book is actually quite good and has a pretty complex plot attached to it.
Richard, as mentioned, is a pretty meh to unlikable character. He’s a pretty stereotypical middle-class white man who’s never really considered people who are ‘other,’ such as refugees and even, I think, his wife, who died before the book began. He is able to add an interesting perspective to things since he grew up and lived a portion of his adult life in the DDR and that isn’t really something that’s explored a ton in English-language books (though, to be fair, Go Went Gone was originally pub’d as Gehen Ging Gegangen and I do recommend reading the German version if you can, certain parts don’t quite translate 1-to-1 and I do think it adds something to the experience). I enjoyed Richard’s comparisons of current Germany vs the DDR as well as his realizations of how die Wende/reunification of Germany was similar the changes refugees were experiencing as they migrated. There really is this distinct change in his character toward the late-middle to end of the book. It isn’t a huge change, but it certainly is a change in a more positive direction.
I liked the interview portions of the book as well, even if Richard wasn’t always on his best behavior, and thought it was a good way to introduce readers to the other characters in a natural exposition. There were definitely some weird bits here too, though, like Richard renaming some of the refugees whose names he couldn’t remember after Greek gods, or when he thinks about hitting on a 20-something language teacher. But overall I liked the interview portions and think they added color and texture to the book. I liked the men too. Erpenbeck took pains to make sure they weren’t just copycats of one another with slightly different back stories and actually gave them each personalities and characteristics distinct from one another. I know some reviews suggested she might have done interview with refugees, which is possible, there’s certainly a lot of information and research in here about asylum laws, so these stories and characters could be cobbled together from real people.
The second half of the book is really the part where things get going. As Germany struggles to figure out where to place the refugees, they get shuffled around, laws get changed, some men need to apply for this, others for this, etc. it’s chaos. On top of offering a more in-depth view of the process, this second part of the book gets Richard involved in a more active role, where he actually begins to befriend the men he’s interviewing and offers to take them to interviews or offers them jobs, knowing they are blocked from having them and shamed for not having them. So the book definitely gets more personal in this part and we’re really able to be in the story as opposed to skimming the top of it. We get to know more about the characters, including Richard, and start to see more of this idea that things can be impacted and changed at the individual level, which seems to be a rather big theme for Erpenbeck.
I also liked the ending of the book, except for the very end, which once more launched Richard back into ‘meh to asshole’ territory. It’s hard to know how to feel about him when he changed so much over the course of the book, but still has things like this in his past that are just…it’s insane, really. But, aside from the very end, the rest of the ending is pretty good. It takes this idea of ‘politics and laws are the problem’ and gives us the answer that people, that community, that compassion are the answers. If Richard and his friends—the ones who are actually his friends—had continued on the way they had been, with Richard curious but distant and his friends compassionate but uninvolved, then nothing would’ve changed, and so this idea of change occurring at the individual level is again brought around. Plus, who doesn’t like protests and hideouts?
All in all, it’s a good book, even if Richard isn’t necessarily a good character. It can be slow at time, particularly in the beginning, but for me the second half of the book made up for it.
