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Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 18/05/2025

I want to get off Goodreads this year, so I'm adding a /reading route to my site. Each book will have its own page, with a progress indicator, reading time, and my review. I might also try rendering a section for my in-progress notes.

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Andrew 🧮 @ndrewwm.com · 18/05/2025

here's a little WIP

Go, Went, Gone
Jenny Erpenbeck (2015)
★★★★★

Started: 2023-08-30

Finished: 2024-11-28

Book cover for 9780811225946.

I’d been working through this one for a while. The story follows Richard, a professor of classic literature living in Berlin, widowed, and recently retired. Richard comes to meet and advocate for a group of men, refugees from northern Africa and the middle-east, that are seeking work in Berlin. While its events are fictional, I think Go, Went, Gone is excellent for examining the practice and consequences of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics. Through its characters, the novel satirizes and criticizes bureaucratic processes that exclude and sweep vulnerable people out of public view. It’s extremely easy to quietly, even politely, avoid the gaze of people in our communities that need help. That aversion sustains the legal structures that enable our society to treat people as disposable, burdens, or less than human. Encounters that Go, Went, Gone’s characters have with formalistic language (drawn from administrative correspondence or legislative pronouncements) help illustrate this. These moments surface contradictions between liberal society’s nominal concern and respect for individual rights with its policing of boundaries for participation. At times, Go, Went, Gone’s pace can be slow, but it provides much to chew on, and is worth picking up.

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