Pity the poor writer whose fate is to be harried with opportunities and accolades. She wins yet another prize, requiring yet another acceptance speech.

Would she like to write more essays, give a series of lectures, deliver a keynote address? She is inducted into a prestigious academy, says a few words to acknowledge the honour. She wins more prizes, goes on reading tours. She hangs out the laundry, unpacks the dishwasher, bakes a birthday cake. She publishes two more well-received novels, The End of Days and Go, Went, Gone. Her mother dies not long after the publication of her fourth book, Visitation, which wins a prize, so she is obliged to write an acceptance speech. She publishes a short novel, The Book of Words. Her child is growing up her writing routine stabilises. She receives requests to write other things, essays on topics she would not have thought to write about, so she does. Sure, why not? The stories become her second book, Trinkets. People ask her to write some short stories. The novel is published the reviews are favourable. Then she buys a computer and uses it to write her first novel, The Old Child. ‘That was,’ she recalls, ‘the first time that I experienced how someone else could open a door for me into my own reflections.’ She begins in her mid-twenties, with the memory of writing a seminar paper on an obscure topic suggested by her professor, using an old electric typewriter and editing by cutting up the pages with scissors and rearranging the text. Jenny Erpenbeck prefaces Not a Novel with a four-page summary of her literary career to date.

A splintered spindle