A major and important book, Go, Went, Gone tackles the issue of human displacement with intelligence and empathy.

This powerful German novel in translation humanizes refugees at a time when many find it politically expedient to demonize them. Focusing on the European refugee crisis, the story looks at how an unwelcoming, privileged society handles issues of race and nationality, and explores humankind's search for meaning.

The story centers on a retired professor, Richard, who, in his own twilight, is fixated with time. He is also intrigued by the African asylum seekers who stage a hunger strike in Berlin, headed with the slogan "We become visible." He decides to take up their cause—teaching them German, assisting them with paperwork, and advocating on their behalf.

Prose is glistening and polished, with formidable intellectual heft. It includes a litany of allusions to the likes of Ovid, Homer, and Proust, as well as profound observations about the human condition, as with "it makes no difference to the lake whether it's a fish decomposing beneath its surface or a human being."

The plot unfolds expertly, taking Richard on a journey to realize how much he fundamentally has in common with foreigners fleeing violence. The novel charts his progression from a reluctant retiree who skittishly makes a beeline to his train at the sight of dark-skinned refugees to a caring volunteer who hears them out and tries to help them get settled.

Richard has a well-developed voice and makes incisive observations, such as that refugees scrape by on around five euros a day after legal fees and remittances. He gathers heart-wrenching stories from migrants like Yussef, Ali, and Osarobo. Their tales are fleshed out and attain great pathos. At times, the novel reads like a collection of authentic refugee narratives, all of which help explain why people flee their homelands for unknown and often-hostile shores.

A major and important book, Go, Went, Gone tackles a contemporary issue with morality, intelligence, and empathy. The novel gives much-needed visibility to displaced migrants with no options. It's a portrait of humanity in extremis, and it vividly renders a man who seeks to infuse his time on earth with higher purpose.

A major and important book, Go, Went, Gone tackles the issue of human displacement with intelligence and empathy.

This powerful German novel in translation humanizes refugees at a time when many find it politically expedient to demonize them. Focusing on the European refugee crisis, the story looks at how an unwelcoming, privileged society handles issues of race and nationality, and explores humankind's search for meaning.

The story centers on a retired professor, Richard, who, in his own twilight, is fixated with time. He is also intrigued by the African asylum seekers who stage a hunger strike in Berlin, headed with the slogan "We become visible." He decides to take up their cause—teaching them German, assisting them with paperwork, and advocating on their behalf.

Prose is glistening and polished, with formidable intellectual heft. It includes a litany of allusions to the likes of Ovid, Homer, and Proust, as well as profound observations about the human condition, as with "it makes no difference to the lake whether it's a fish decomposing beneath its surface or a human being."

The plot unfolds expertly, taking Richard on a journey to realize how much he fundamentally has in common with foreigners fleeing violence. The novel charts his progression from a reluctant retiree who skittishly makes a beeline to his train at the sight of dark-skinned refugees to a caring volunteer who hears them out and tries to help them get settled.

Richard has a well-developed voice and makes incisive observations, such as that refugees scrape by on around five euros a day after legal fees and remittances. He gathers heart-wrenching stories from migrants like Yussef, Ali, and Osarobo. Their tales are fleshed out and attain great pathos. At times, the novel reads like a collection of authentic refugee narratives, all of which help explain why people flee their homelands for unknown and often-hostile shores.

A major and important book, Go, Went, Gone tackles a contemporary issue with morality, intelligence, and empathy. The novel gives much-needed visibility to displaced migrants with no options. It's a portrait of humanity in extremis, and it vividly renders a man who seeks to infuse his time on earth with higher purpose.

In this sobering, intellectually acute work, retired classics professor Richard lives alone in Berlin, pottering about his autumnal existence until he sees a news report featuring ten African refugees conducting a hunger strike before Berlin's Town Hall. He's struck by the idea that they have made themselves visible by refusing to say who they are and begins following their plight, finally visiting a facility where several have been moved after an agreement with the Senate. His motivations are initially self-serving; he wants to investigate the nature of time, "something he can probably do best in conversation with those who have fallen out of it." But as the men speak matter-of-factly of their lives and losses, he begins to realize his ignorance, drawing closer and even inviting a man named Osarobo home to play the piano. Meanwhile, Hans Fallada Prize winner Erpenbeck (Visitation), whose East German background informs the narrative, clarifies the wrong-headedness of Europe asylum laws as she reflects on borders that can and can't be crossed and the pain of moving beyond the surface of things. VERDICT Occasionally slow-moving but a stunning and intimate look into the refugee crisis; refreshingly, the characters don't finally embrace sentimentally but inch toward understanding.

The staid existences of elderly Berliners and the fraught, uncertain trajectories of African refugees intersect in Erpenbeck's melancholy and affecting novel. The conduit for this intersection is the widowed Richard, a recently retired classics professor, whose search for an occupation leads him to a nearby nursing home where a group of refugees is housed while the government deliberates regarding their right to live and work in Germany. Becoming a regular visitor to the home, Richard befriends Awad, a Ghanaian who had been living in Libya before emigrating to Germany, and Rashid, whose family was violently attacked during a religious holiday in Nigeria and who has not seen his mother in 13 years. Awad, Rashid, and the other young men, with their stories of violence and loss, share the traumatic experience of entering Europe via a perilous maritime route, in which "the passengers below deck had no chance at all when their boat capsized." Subtly, Erpenbeck (The End of Days) suggests that the refugees and the Germans have in common a history of displacement: Richard and his friends "are post-war children" who were citizens of East Germany, then saw the system "under which they'd lived most of their lives" collapse. The narrative emerges as an insightful call to conscience and an undeniable argument for our common humanity. (Sept.)