Why I'm enjoying reading his novel about African immigrants in Berlin

Jenny Erpenbeck's novel Go, Went, Gone (representing a declension of an irregular verb and thus the drills to learn a new language) published in German in 2015 and last year in English, begins as a novel about a man recently retired from a senior post in I think philosophy at a German University, now, widowed and alone, finding himself bored w the daily routines and obsessing about a man who had drowned in the lake across from his house and whose body has never been recoverered (which keeps him and others from the thought of using the lake for swimming or outings - more on this later or in future posts).  The man takes to wandering the streets of Berlin (his house appears to be what wasn't then east Berlin and all of his explorations have the aura of discovery - his life's and career seem to have been circumscribed by the limitations of eastern bloc governance and culture a he is not what he could have been had he lived a few blocks away).  In his wandering she observes homeless African refugees living in a public square - some engage s in a hunger strike , which draws media coverage. The man decides to begin a research project on these refugees and uses his academic Fred's - this work is far out of his field of expertise, as he recognizes - to gain access to a building where some refugees have been given housing.  His interviews w some of ten refugees from Africa, using Italian as a common language (they all have reached Germany after a stay in a camp in Italy) constitute much of the first quarter of the novel. Generally I'm not so keen on these novels that are tales of suffering and blight , but this one has moved more so far more than others because of the mediating device of the professor - as we watch him change and develop new interests and even friendships this novel moves in unexpected directions). GWG alsorecalls the recent american film in which Richard Jenkins also playing a professor unexpectedly befriends a family of African immigrants who have squatted in his house in Greenwich Village.