{"id":4392,"date":"2010-09-08T23:48:33","date_gmt":"2010-09-09T03:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=4392"},"modified":"2016-06-19T01:12:04","modified_gmt":"2016-06-19T05:12:04","slug":"jenny-erpenbeck-visitation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2010\/09\/08\/jenny-erpenbeck-visitation\/","title":{"rendered":"Jenny Erpenbeck: Visitation<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Visitation<\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\nby Jenny Erpenbeck (Heimsuchung<\/em>, 2008)<\/span>\r\ntranslated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (2010)<\/span>\r\nNew Directions (2010)<\/span>\r\n151 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
Jenny Erpenbeck is one of those names that I frequently catch glimpses of in my peripheral vision.\u00a0She was longlisted for the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Book of Words<\/em>, but I didn’t read\u00a0it or even read much about it.\u00a0Other than that, I knew New Directions had published some of her earlier works, but I had never read anything by her — not even a\u00a0short story — and I really only knew\u00a0was a young\u00a0writer brought up in East Berlin,\u00a0who, over the past decade, has won several prizes in her native country.\u00a0I was anxious to get to know her, but I’m not sure I would have now were it not for her translator Susan Bernofsky, whose\u00a0work on Robert Walser was brilliant. Based on\u00a0Bernofsky’s ability to rather than on Erpenbeck’s\u00a0I read\u00a0Visitation<\/em>.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n
Visitation <\/em>will remind some people of Simon Mawer’s 2009 Booker shortlisted The Glass Room<\/em>. Both take place in\u00a0the tumultuous world of\u00a0twentieth century Europe, particularly around World War II, and both use a central location — a home — to explore a variety of people and a variety of themes from the time period. I read about half of The Glass Room<\/em>earlier this year, but it just wasn’t holding me (there was nothing wrong with it; I just wasn’t in it at the time, but I hope sometime to have another go).\u00a0Erpenbeck’s book is much shorter (and much less conventional a novel) and, to me, much more successful at drawing the reader into a world of impressions as time drifts by a home in which various visitors spend some time,\u00a0and this\u00a0worked well for me.<\/p>\n
The book begins like\u00a0a fairy tale with the chapter\u00a0“The Wealthy Farmer and His Four Daughters.” Here we get to know the land (which was briefly introduced in geological terms in the prologue), a home built upon the land, and a widowed farmer and — well — his four daughters. There’s familial peace, some scandal, and the location is imbued with a sense of human life.\u00a0The language is repetitious, as if it is oral and speaking in refrains.\u00a0Even time tends to go in and out.<\/p>\n
This isn’t to suggest that the work isn’t cohesive.\u00a0It is disorientating at first, but eventually it settles down, or we learn to read it.\u00a0Soon a family of Jews is given “a full half”\u00a0of market value for the land.\u00a0The family is\u00a0going to be lost\u00a0that had such thoughts as this:<\/p>\n
When the willow tree has grown up tall and can tickle the fish with its hair, you’ll still be coming here to visit your cousins, and you’ll remember the day you helped plant it, grandmother Hermine says to little Doris.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The story goes from World War II to its aftermath when “The Red Army Officer” comes to spend a night.\u00a0This was the chapter, incidentally, which really pulled me into the book. It was powerful to watch the land go in and out of possession in the years after World War II, until those trying to escape to the West weren’t Jews trying to escape but rather East Germans trying to escape East Berlin.\u00a0As I said above, the story manages to run cohesive, despite its impressionism — it doesn’t feel episodic.\u00a0The characters relate in more ways than location, though that one spot brings their perspective to us.\u00a0The attempts to own or to divest property, or just to find solace there for a while, brings the characters together.<\/p>\n
And, as with Robert Walser, Susan Bernovsky shows her skill as a translator. She picks up on wordplay that simply could not have been easy to translate.<\/p>\n
Now, the impressionism will put off some people.\u00a0Not only is it impressionistic as it blurs time and space, but Erpenbeck also has a few\u00a0spells of technical writing (such as city ordinances and the like) which are important to the feel but sometimes difficult to read.\u00a0It is\u00a0not always a pleasant read in the sense that one can derive joy out of vibrant passages, but it is genuinely interesting. And there is a lot of joy to be gained in piecing it together and seeing the place enhance the feel of its people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Trevor reviews Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation<\/em>, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[800,203],"tags":[880,919,556,969],"coauthors":[505],"class_list":["post-4392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-jenny-erpenbeck","tag-2000s","tag-919","tag-german","tag-new-directions"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/Visitation.jpg?fit=347%2C530&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-18Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4392"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18779,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392\/revisions\/18779"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4392"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}