Visitation

by Jenny Erpenbeck, Susan Bernofsky (Translator)

Overview

A bestseller in Germany, Visitation has established Jenny Erpenbeck as one of Europe’s most significant contemporary authors.

A forested property on a Brandenburg lake outside Berlin lies at the heart of this darkly sensual, elegiac 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811218351
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/30/2010
Series:	New Directions Paperbook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	136,367
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. New Directions publishes her books The Old Child & Other Stories, The Book of Words, and Visitation, which NPR called "a story of the century as seen by the objects we've known and lost along the way."

Susan Bernofsky is the acclaimed translator of Hermann Hesse, Robert Walser, and Jenny Erpenbeck, and the recipient of many awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. She teaches literary translation at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

In this original and evocative novel, Erpenbeck (The Book of Words) charts the history of a property in the Brandenburg hills through snippets--temporarily opened windows offering brief, tantalizing glimpses before slamming shut. There is a Jewish girl murdered during the Holocaust; a disillusioned Communist activist who leaves Nazi Germany and returns after WWII; an architect who collaborated with Albert Speers on the Germania Project; two hard-partying structural engineering students who try to escape to the West, and so on. Amid all these protagonists, there is the recurring figure of "The Gardener," who goes about the bucolic business of maintaining the property with unwavering application. Erpenbeck's elliptical style, rife with naturalistic descriptions of landscape and geology, is better at describing the physical world than the emotional life of her characters, but in so doing, she hammers home her basic point--that people are part of the same continuum as the trees and glaciers that come and go over eons, and that "eternal life already exists during a human lifetime." (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Erpenbeck will get under your skin."

Washington Post Book World

"Jenny Erpenbeck's writing is a lure that leads us—off-centre, as one travels into a vortex—into the most haunted and haunting territory. This is a novel of profound clarity and precise grief."

Anne Michaels

"Bernofsky’s translation vividly captures the rhythm of Erpenbeck’s original and allows us to experience this stunning parable of change and brevity in all its beauty and wonder."

Jewish Book World

"Erpenbeck’s voice is fresh and independent and very convincing."

Mostly Fiction - Frederike Knabe

"Jenny Erpenbeck is the rising star of the German literary scene."

Cosmopolitan

"Visitation adds to her compact scenarios something intangible and enormous, which works on them from outside their modest frames with a force eroding human history and its claims to establish durable meaning."

The Nation

"Love, death and passion, from the Weimar Republic to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Wonderful German prose."

Playboy

"The brutality of her subjects, combined with the fierce intelligence and tenderness at work behind her restrained unvarnished prose, is overwhelming."

Nicole Krauss

"Love, death and passion, from the Weimar Republic to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Wonderful German prose."

Playboy

"Jenny Erpenbeck is the rising star of the German literary scene."

Cosmopolitan

This brief novel, the translation of a best seller in Germany, covers the sweep of the 20th century through the story of a small piece of land bordering a lake outside Berlin. The tale's origins seem folkloric but begin only 100 years before, when one of the landowner's daughters goes mad and wanders shoeless along the shore. An architect purchases the property and builds a unique home with intricate closets, a painted antique door, and stained-glass windows. The house next door is owned by a Jewish family; caught up in the nightmare of the Holocaust, some escape, some do not. The house survives invading Soviets, but the Communist takeover, the moribund economy that results, and ownership disputes that leave the house empty and unmaintained for years finally destroy it and the family connections it forged. VERDICT In personalizing historical events, Erpenbeck (The Old Child & Other Stories) introduces themes reminiscent of some of W.G. Sebald's novels, especially The Emigrants, but her detailed, dreamy descriptions are more poetry than prose, full of repetitions that evoke the polishing of fine handiwork. Highly recommended.—Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal