Visitation

July 26, 2010
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."

Starred review from September 15, 2010

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

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