Rate this book

Visitation (2008)

by Jenny Erpenbeck(Favorite Author)

3.7 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

081121835X (ISBN13: 9780811218351)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

New Directions

review 1: Jamie Carr (Tin House Books, Editorial Intern): Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation tells the story of a landscape unchanged by the politics surrounding it. Set on a property outside of Berlin, the narrative oscillates between it’s tenants and spans the last century. Some tenants, like The Gardener, reappear through the book while others exist only through their remains, ie: the towels left in the bathhouse, the porcelain unearthed from the backyard, the iron bird built by a tenant that inspires another, years later, to nickname the room it’s perched outside of The Little Bird Room. The prose is haunting. And the narrative often looks outside of itself, borrowing nursery rhymes, language from legal documents, myth, and more. Mostly, i’m reminded of the power of place. And... more left to consider, what remains when we’re gone. It’s translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.
review 2: At times this feels genuinely foreign, which is not usually the case with translated novels, and for a while that disorientation kept me at bay. But I am already thinking about how I need to read this again, with the inkling that these four stars will then become five. Erpenbeck seems to splinter and re-form Germany's history, much the way Faulkner does Mississippi's, and Faulkner too reveals more upon rereading. There's something brilliant here. less

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