One of the best novels published this year was also one of the most scandalously neglected, at least in this country. I greatly admired “Go, Went, Gone,” by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions), the most prominent and serious German novelist of her generation. When Erpenbeck wins the Nobel Prize in a few years, I suspect that this novel will be cited.

If I say that it’s a novel about the European refugee crisis, I make it sound more portentous and much more abstract than it is; more important, I do a disservice to Erpenbeck’s appealing, pragmatic humility. “Go, Went, Gone” is not a novel about but a novel in search of a number of African refugees, and their lives in Germany. Erpenbeck, who grounds her fiction in careful research and documentary (she interviewed thirteen recent immigrants from various African countries, whom she thanks), structures her novel around European ignorance and curiosity: her German protagonist, a privileged, retired professor of classics named Richard, decides to discover as much as he can about the lives of some African refugees whom he notices, one day, at a protest in the center of Berlin. He is embarrassed that he knows so little about the men who are protesting in Alexanderplatz; if he doesn’t really know where Burkina Faso is, or what the capital of Ghana is, how can he know anything about the day-to-day indignities and horrors of the men he casually walks past?

Richard’s ignorance is, very likely, the reader’s ignorance. And when he decides to correct that ignorance, his quest of discovery becomes ours, too. The novel is an effort of inquiry, not a political statement or a liberal appropriation. Over the course of “Go, Went, Gone,” he interviews, befriends, and finally accommodates several of the refugees; we become intimately acquainted with the long journeys of Awad, from Ghana; Rashid, from Nigeria; and Osarobo, from Niger. The book’s political subject is, of course, heavy and complex, but the novel itself is utterly lucid, direct, simple, and honest. One line will speak for Erpenbeck’s entire humane project: “Richard has read Foucault and Baudrillard, and also Hegel and Nietzsche, but he doesn’t know what you can eat when you have no money to buy food.” I think if George Orwell were alive now, that’s a line he might easily have written.

I also admired a very different, extremely beautiful novel, “Reservoir 13,” by Jon McGregor (Catapult). Despite the fact that it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this book, too, went almost unnoticed in the United States. “Reservoir 13” is nothing less than the portrait of an entire community, a northern English village, over the course of thirteen years. In a sense, it’s a radical novel: nothing much happens, the plot is almost subterranean, and McGregor practices an experimental poetics in which no character—among a very large cast—is lingered over for more than a few paragraphs at a time. But “Reservoir 13” uses unfamiliar techniques for deeply traditional and humane purposes. The repetitive and circular narrative—the same things happening to the same people, year after year—yields a kind of prose almanac in which the reader can measure the passage of months and years in a single community: we see how lives are lived, how the seasons come and go, how the light fades and grows, month by month. Novels aspire to be social documents, group portraits, measurers of time, renovators of the ordinary, but few come close to achieving those ambitions. This entrancing book does.

It’s doubtless gauche to recommend a book to which I contributed the foreword—but I wrote the foreword because I admired the book, and the book is as brilliant now as it was when it was published, three months ago; and, once again, it received very little American notice. The young Danish-American critic Morten Høi Jensen, who is just thirty, has written his first book, and it happens to be the first biography in English of a major nineteenth-century Danish novelist. “A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen” (Yale University Press) narrates the life and amplifies the historical context of the writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–85), who was an almost exact contemporary of Chekhov’s and who, alas, died of the same ailment, tuberculosis.

If you had asked most major European writers, around 1920, for a list of the great nineteenth-century novelists, Jacobsen would have featured near the top. He was admired and praised by Lawrence, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, and Rilke. Adorno and Benjamin discuss him in their correspondence. He remains canonical in Denmark, where he is still routinely assigned in school, but perhaps because he was a Romantic atheist his renown began to dim somewhat after the Second World War. Contemporary Anglophone readers, however, now have a superb recent translation, by Tiina Nunnally (for Penguin Classics), of his best-known novel, “Niels Lyhne”; and they now have Jensen’s elegant, concise, wonderfully well-written biography. Jensen brings alive the intellectual ferment of Copenhagen in the eighteen-sixties and seventies, when naturalism and secularism were taking root. Jacobsen played a large role in that modernist revolution: a trained natural scientist, he translated Darwin’s major work into Danish; he was a committed atheist in a society that was still deeply traditional and ecclesiastically conformist; and he used his great storytelling powers to stage and prosecute his radical nonconformism. In the English tradition, his nearest rivals might be Thomas Hardy or D. H. Lawrence. But Jacobsen is urban where Hardy and Lawrence are generally rural, and he reads more like a God-infested Flaubert. If that sounds like your ideal, then seek out “Niels Lyhne,” surely one of the most shatteringly atheistic books ever written—and take Morten Høi Jensen’s rich, supple introduction with you.

Michelle Kuo’s memoir, “Reading With Patrick” (Random House), is a deeply moving account of the time she spent as a young teacher in a very poor county in Arkansas, and the interaction she had with a particular student, Patrick Browning. Patrick had been one of Kuo’s more intelligent and ambitious students, so when he is jailed on a murder charge, she suspends her own career (at this point, she has left Arkansas and has just graduated from law school) and decides to return to the Delta, to commit her time to mentoring him in prison. Anyone interested in questions of pedagogy, racism, and incarceration in America, not to mention literary criticism, will be enthralled by this book. In a way, it belongs as a kind of nonfictional counterpart to Erpenbeck’s novel, for it is powered by similar intensities of political humility and self-sacrifice. And Kuo’s gesture is rewarded: over the course of seven months, while Patrick is awaiting trial, she reads prose and poetry with him (difficult, serious work: W. G. Sebald, George Herbert, Ammons, Whitman, Baldwin, Akhmatova), tutoring him in how to read, but also delightedly watching him grow in confidence and proficiency as a writer. There is an astonishing moment of breakthrough when Patrick, whose prose was near-illegible when he entered jail, finally writes an exquisitely eloquent and lyrical letter to his daughter, Cherish. Patrick describes a dream in which he and his daughter are crossing a white mountain stream: “Across the stream, the smoke gray mountains of paradisal lines are clear in the sunlight.” Kuo, typically honest, direct, and unassuming, comments, “He had come so far, but what struck me then and for many years afterward was how little I had done for him. I don’t mean this in the way of false modesty. I mean that it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books, and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.” As with Erpenbeck’s novel, it is hard to read this challenging book—again, oddly neglected this year—and not think, You must change your life.

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