“A ball is something that rolls, sometimes it bounces high. A father is a man who, for a long time, is taller than you. Before my father goes to confession, he shaves and wears a clean shirt. Anyone who would want to play ball with only one head would only be bothered by the nose.” Let us listen carefully to the narrator’s voice. Let us see how she tries to make sense of what she observes around her, in her home, in the schoolyard, in the street. In contrast to her mother, her own eyes are black. What do the gunshots mean, after all? Are there glass bones? Are there stone people? And where exactly is the truth? A threatening ambiguity defines everything in this haunting story.

In her third book, the short novel Playing with Words (2004), Jenny Erpenbeck masterfully delves into the inner world of a young woman who managed to survive a “dirty” dictatorial regime, in the “land of eternal summer,” somewhere in South America. Thus, we discover her parents and the strange visitors in her life.

In Playing with Words, the agreed Greek title for this debut novel, Jenny Erpenbeck stirs the reader by composing masterful sequences that would be envied by great creators of the seventh art. And this cinematic perfection that pervades Playing with Words dictates the pace and the way it is read: it is read breathlessly, ideally in a whisper, like a confession, drawing us along in its vortex.