Mireille Juchau

And also as he becomes more involved with the men, he has to decide whether to trust or not to trust each of them when he invites some of them into his home.

I think the interesting thing about his relationship with some of the men is that it's quite maternal.

So he is quite a formal man and quite, he has a lot of preconceptions about refugees that I think are shared by the culture.

So he, at moments, Erpenbeck shows us the headlines and the talkback radio conversation about the refugees and

the sort of cliches that people bring out in terms of whether or not they can be trusted and whether or not they should be allowed to stay.

And we're not quite sure where he stands in relation to those views, but gradually he starts to take care of some of these men in different ways.

He takes them to the dentist.

He invites one of them to his home to play piano and

He invites another one to his home to read Dante's Divine Comedy because he knows that he can only speak Italian and that's the only language they can share because this man has come and stayed in Italy for a time.

So they read Dante's Divine Comedy together.

So it's quite, there's something quite maternal about that relationship between him and those men, which I think is not something I've read before in this territory, in this story about refugees.

Jenny Erpenbeck talks about the fact that she grew up in the East and that she thinks that that gives her a special kind of understanding of people who've had to struggle for the smallest things, because she said growing up poor in the East gave her an ability to sort of empathise with people who weren't just given everything they needed.

But all through the novel she refers to the city's history.

So a group of Richard's friends also become involved with the refugees and he starts to tell them their stories and each of his friends in turn recounts some aspect of their own history.

So we get a sense that we're dealing with not just the men's past but with a city that's kind of steeped in similar stories of displacement and exile and loss and

And so at every point, I think as you move through the city, Erpenbeck shows you how that is built into the fabric of the city.

So there's a lot of reference to aspects of the city's past as we move through.

Definitely.

And I think we're made, I think Erpenbeck knows exactly what she's doing.

So I think that's quite deliberate that we're made, we're sort of positioned from Richard's point of view at the beginning.