Jenny Erpenbeck

Susan Bernofsky

A bestseller in Germany, Visitation has established Jenny Erpenbeck as one of Europe’s most significant contemporary authors. A house on the forested bank of a Brandenburg lake outside Berlin (once belonging to Erpenbeck’s grandparents) is the focus of this compact, beautiful novel. Encompassing over one hundred years of German history, from the nineteenth century to the Weimar Republic, from World War II to the Socialist German Democratic Republic, and finally reunification and its aftermath, Visitation offers the life stories of twelve individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the last century, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation, with its drama and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.

Visitation

Andrew John Kinney

There are some nice descriptions and turns of phrase in this slim book, and Jenny Erpenbeck addresses several aspects of the German experience over the last hundred years, but generally I was underwhelmed. The book felt like work, though there were segments that piqued my interest, like the migration of ethnic Germans from the "colonies" of the east in the former Hapsburg territories and even from Ukraine. This was a hot topic when I lived in Germany, and I remember Richard von Weizsacker hosting a televised discussion about it. The description of Klara's madness is well written, but a good deal of the book felt flat to me. The thought of the Russian Major, marveling at the beautiful house by the lake, wondering why a people who had so much already felt the need to invade his country, was striking to me. The idea of offensive war as theft writ large always seems about right.

Maybe coming directly from finishing Cal Flyn's compellingly readable Islands of Abandonment to Visitation made me notice the non-compelling nature of Erpenbeck's book more than I would otherwise.

amelia osullivan-finch

Magdalena Schreiber

Christopher McCaffery

By the side of a lake in Brandenburg, a young architect builds the house of his dreams - a summerhouse with wrought-iron balconies, stained-glass windows the colour of jewels, and a bedroom with a hidden closet, all set within a beautiful garden. But the land on which he builds has a dark history of violence that began with the drowning of a young woman in the grip of madness and that grows darker still over the course of the century: the Jewish neighbours disappear one by one; the Red Army requisitions the house, burning the furniture and trampling the garden; a young East German attempts to swim his way to freedom in the West; a couple return from brutal exile in Siberia and leave the house to their granddaughter, who is forced to relinquish her claim upon it and sell to new owners intent upon demolition. Reaching far into the past, and recovering what was lost and what was buried, Jenny Erpenbeck tells a story both beautiful and brutal, about the things that haunt a home.

Visitation

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