Kodin ikävä

by Jenny Erpenbeck, Helen Moster (Translator)

Kun berliiniläinen arkkitehti 1920-luvulla rakentaa idyllisen järven rannalle talon kesänviettopaikakseen, hän tuskin aavistaa, millaisia vuosikymmeniä talo ja sen asukkaat vielä saavat todistaa. Miten käy juutalaisen verkatehtailijan, jonka unelmat särkyvät natsien valtaantulon myötä? Entä millaista kotia kaipasi Moskovasta maanpaosta palaava kommunistipariskunta, joka karvaaksi pettymyksekseen saa huomata ideologiansa pettäneen heidät?

Ihmiset ja aikakaudet tulevat ja menevät, ja rauhan ja erilaisten taisteluiden aika vuorottelee. Kymmeniä tuhansia vuosia vanha järvi sekä talo sen rannalla kuitenkin pysyvät ja kertovat omaa haikeaa tarinaansa.

Jenny Erpenbeck (s. 1967) tunnetaan omaperäisestä, vähäeleisestä tyylistään, joka on kiehtonut lukijoita ympäri maailmaa.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Germany, German Literature, Historical, Contemporary, Novels

172 pages, Hardcover

First published February 2, 2008

About the author

Jenny Erpenbeck (born 12 March 1967 in East Berlin) is a German director and writer.

Jenny Erpenbeck is the daughter of the physicist, philosopher and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her grandparents are the authors Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner. In Berlin she attended an Advanced High School, where she graduated in 1985. She then completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters as props and wardrobe supervisor.

From 1988 to 1990 Erpenbeck studied theatre at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1990 she changed her studies to Music Theater Director (studying with, among others, Ruth Berghaus, Heiner Müller and Peter Konwitschny) at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory. After the successful completion of her studies in 1994 (with a production of Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles, she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's Erwartung, Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and a world premiere of her own piece Cats Have Seven Lives. As a freelance director, she directed in 1998 different opera houses in Germany and Austria, including Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in Aachen, Acis and Galatea at the Berlin State Opera and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zaide in Nuremberg/Erlangen.

In the 1990s Erpenbeck started a writing career in addition to her directing. She is author of narrative prose and plays: in 1999, History of the Old Child, her debut; in 2001, her collection of stories Trinkets; in 2004, the novella Dictionary; and in February 2008, the novel Visitation. In March 2007, Erpenbeck took over a biweekly column by Nicole Krauss in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her son, born 2002.

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Home is where the heart is

Reading Neil MacGregror’s fascinating Germany: Memories of a Nation amply affirmed I still have a long path to go in the sighting of Germany’s history and literature. Sensing this need, two GR friends were so kind to bring Jenny Erpenbeck’s novels to my attention, in particular Visitation (Heimsuchung). As Visitation is fiction which is ingeniously connected with episodes from Germany’s troubling contemporary history, this short novel was a treat I could bask in, getting the best of both worlds, of history writing and excellent prose.

Eastern Germany, a plot of land close to Berlin. A lake. A summer cottage. A house. A garden. Behold the ostensibly idyllic and innocent setting where Jenny Erpenbeck, German writer and opera director, stages her magnificently imaginative composition, dense with props which seem so trivial in everyday life - clothes, kitchen ware, towels, sheets - but are fraught with ambivalence. In 12 slims chapters the subsequent residents of the house and adjacent land - mostly nameless characters apart from the Jewish characters, who significantly enough do get names - are grinded through the implacable mill of Germany’s turbulent history. With seven-league boots Erpenbeck clears a way through roughly 150 unsettling years, from the Imperial Germany, via WWII and the Holocaust, the Russian occupation of East-Germany, the Communist era to Germany’s reunification and its aftermath. Notwithstanding the breathtaking pace, Erpenbeck knows how to delight and grow the reader silent with her gossamer prose. Snippets of individual lives and domestic scenes and tragedies are daintily painted, subtly etching the impact of horrendous events, changes of regime, change of power rules and morals, on ordinary lives. The graceful prose skillfully contrasts with some brutal events dealt with. Cross referencing, creating an atmosphere of menace through unveiling gradually the horror by carefully stashing away hints in minor details in a previous chapter, connecting and entwining the poignant and tragic tranches de vie of the subsequent residents and visitors, the intricate structure of the novel resembles the hidden closets in the lake house.

The only figure which is constantly present and is not washed away by History is the gardener. Ineluctably, nature’s seasonal cycle urges the gardener to intervene, repetitively performing his tasks tending the garden, the intermittent sentences on his routines (sowing, planting, watering) knotting together the passage of the characters, taking the reader from one resident’s life to another, like the recurrent variations on the Promenade theme in Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition mirror the viewer pacing progressively past the paintings, until the theme merges in the movement and reaches its apotheosis in the finale, the Gate of Kiev.
What would you call home? Can one create oneself a lasting home? Does the act of building equals creating a place in the world? One of the characters, the Architect, ponders on his profession:

(…) planning homes, planning a homeland. Four walls around a block of air., wresting a block of air from amid all that burgeoning, billowing matter, with claws of stone, pinning it down. Home. A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothes. Homestead.

The German title ‘Heimsuchung’, seeking for a home, where one is safe and secure, exhumes the melancholy yearning of the characters in the novel. Almost all of them will be chased from and lose their homes and familiar surroundings, or even their physical and psychological integrity and worse, become effaced by the ravages of Time, like the slow decay and decrepitation of the house and garden themselves.

His profession used to encompass three dimensions, height, width and depth; It was always his business to build things high, wide and deep, but now the fourth dimension has caught up with him: time, which is now expelling him from house and home.

There is a poignant sense of contingency of human existence to this novel. Panta rhei. Everything is temporary. Time consumes and crushes man and his futile life and creations. Nothing last forever, apart from the powers of nature. Reading ·Karen·’s wonderful review on Erpenbeck last novel, Gehen, ging, gegangen which does divert from the historical take and deals with migration, a sense of evanescence seems a leitmotiv also discernable in her latest novel: regimes fall, and values change.

Albeit stylistically very different from the poignant oral testimonies recorded by Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets as Erpenbeck’s prose takes a much more distant approach, this novel also is a compelling account on the devastating effects of regime changes affecting people’s lives.

(Paul Nash - Totes Meer (Dead Sea))

This haunting and intense novel chimes a writer’s voice I’d love to listen to again. Thank you, Philippe and ·Karen·, for putting Jenny Erpenbeck tightly on my radar.

Some of Erpenbeck’s lines on the feeling of homelessness, both of Germans and of refugees are heart-rending.

“Home! he'd cried out like a child that would give anything not to be seeing what it was seeing, but precisely in this one brief moment in which he hid his face in his hands, as it were, even the dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things. H-o-m-e. Which thou must leave ere long. After he had swum his way through a brief bout of despair, the German official had applied to retain his post. those others, though, the ones who had fled their homeland before they themselves could be transformed into monsters, were thrust into homelessness by the news that reached them from back home, not just for the years of their emigration but also, as seems clear to her now, for all eternity, regardless of whether or not they returned.”

”As she looks back like this, time appears in its guise as the twin of time, everything flattening out. Things can follow one after the other only for as long as you are alive in order to extract a splinter from a child’s foot, to take the roast out of the oven before it burns or sew a dress from a potato sack, but with each step you take while fleeing, your baggage grows less and less, with more and more left behind, and sooner or later you just stop and sit there, and then all that is left of life is life itself, and everything else is lying in all the ditches beside all the roads in a land as enormous as the air, and surely here as well you can find those dandelions, these larks.”

”At some point the gong sounds, calling them all to supper. Then her granddaughter comes back up from sunbathing on the dock, humming quietly to herself just as she has done all her life, even as a little girl. Which means that in the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.”

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

……in the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.


How we often we read novels wherein a place takes the centre stage and becomes the main character of the book instead of a person? Visitation is one such book whose author takes you through an unsettling and disquieting journey across the time wherein a place stands as a firm and unyielding character which sees the vagaries of life through various significant events of human history. The place responds to the stimulus of humanity through its calm, restrained and natural way, as you expect. The grand house is situated near a lake in Brandenburg wherein a sequence of occupants shares the house through the dimension of time as if to establish an unshakable relationship which transfigures itself to play an active part in the timeless chronicle of humanity.


The house, originally owned by a royal family of mayor of the village, the family has its ownership since 1650. The poetic prose of the first chapter throws lights over the lives of daughters of the mayor. We are taken through the rituals pertaining to the culture of the village, some of which may come as myths as we often see that traditions become over the years. These mythical rituals pulls the readers into narrative and keep them engrossed right from the start. However, as you we expect from the author of the stature of Jenny Erpenbeck, you are taken aback by the darkness which rises from the depths of the enigmatic lives of the family members. Despite author’s picturesque depiction of the local rituals of the wedding, we see that none of the daughters of the mayor could taste the bittersweet experience of marriage. While three of the daughters could not get married due to various insignificant reasons such as emigration, premarital affair (which of course holds significance in that period of human history) and celibacy but one of the daughters could not prolong her misery of existence and cut the thread of life through her own hands.


As we know that in our typical patriarchal society, male counterparts have been considered as heirs to the property, power and other transferrable possessions, the Mayor, having no heirs, sells the plot in 1930s by dividing among a coffee and tea importer from Frankfurt an der Oder, a Jewish cloth merchant named Arthur from Guben, who enters his son-Ludwig’s name in the contract for inheritance, and an unnamed architect from Berlin who builds a summer cottage there for himself and his fiancé. Although the landholders of that piece of land have changed but does it make any difference to the fate of that land, the architect and the Jewish cloth manufacturer intends to transform the piece of land to their respective homes which could reflect their emotions and feelings as human beings always do with abode, the author mentions that a house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. But as we know that life always shows up the surprises when we least expect them, and these revelations may sometimes take the shape of crisis. The newly appointed landowners, who dream to build their homes of wonder and joy, could only build a bathing house as their dreams are shattered to nothingness by the Holocaust.



link: source



What starts as an account of feelings and sentiments of two families wanting to express themselves through their homes, becomes an eerie portrayal of survival of humanity and the piece of land, through the catastrophes of human lust, and nature. The architect builds his dream home for himself and his young wife on Klara Wurrach’s land by giving it a surreal and fantastical touch through embedding it with hidden closets, secret lookouts, and balcony with unique decorations. We witness the deft strokes of author’s pen which takes us through the evidence of the architect’s pleasure and fulfilment in building his dream house, which we watch with gaping eyes.


The architect and his wife could treasure their dream house for just a few years, the history springs up again in the wake of fabrication of Berlin wall and robs them off the existence they have carved for themselves in the home near the lake, and the house has to be surrendered to the state. The author has been able to draw the sympathy of the reader out towards the architect and his wife, only to be taken aback by the literary technique of disguise and suspension as she reveals the details of the narrative bit by bit through delayed effect, delighting the reader with pleasant surprises. We see that the architect who draws our warmth and compassion, suddenly stir indifference in our conscience, which may even transform in to wrath, in the light of sudden revelation by the author that the architect helps the Jews by allowing them to flee to Africa or Shanghai by paying them half of the market value of the holy land.


The various chapters of the book are actually individual stories which are connected to each other in a enigmatic way that the author throws a sort of riddles at the reader as if her prose is a kind of literary puzzle wherein the reader has to remain attentive throughout the narrative and carefully detect the clues which might be divulged by the author in the successive stories. The entire book comes across as a kind of jigsaw whose pieces demand the diligence of a cautious and mindful reader. We are told that the thoughts of the architect’s wife reveal a mysterious man who “drilled a hole in her eternity,” but the man has been revealed to us only in the successive chapter as a Russian soldier. All the while, for nearly six years now, time has been draining away through the hole the Russian drilled in her eternity near the end of the war. Similarly, we find later that the architect’s wife shares the half loaf of bread, the Russian leaves for her, with her husband who has been oblivious to the primeval an unihibited fight his wife fights with the soldier.


The author creates a cosmic web of interlinked stories which are bound together through the thread of themes, emotions of home, identity, ephemerality of life, and of course, the great piece of land by the Brandenburg Lake. The tales of others, whose lives are connected to the house by the lake, unfold layer by layer as if we are peeling off an onion, ranging from the architect’s wife, the Jewish cloth merchant and his granddaughter who hides in a ghetto in Warsaw, a Russian major who also enjoys the comforts of the house during the War, a writer of communist inclinations which help her to obtain the house, to the granddaughter of the writer. We see that author dexterously uses the historical settings with a nimble touch to formulate the stories around them, and the historical events are revealed to the reader with just brief but significant events of their lives, like we see that the granddaughter of the writer has to sell the house when East German bank accounts are halved.

Did black time keep going on and on, even when a person was no longer doing anything but just sitting there, did time keep going on, dragging even a child who has turned to stone away with it?



Though the book is infused with more than a dozen of characters, however, the author never really allows anyone of them to express themselves. We only get access to the mind of the major characters who express themselves through their muted voices in third person narrative. While each chapter of the book opens up the mind of each of the major characters, the other characters of the book are not allowed to express themselves even through suppressed utterances as they are permitted to communicate only through the shared expanses of main characters. Though it appears that a book of modest page length may not allow its characters to develop fully but Erpenbeck masterfully able to draw our emotions out towards the characters by plunging us deep into their sacred mental spaces so that our feelings amalgamated with that of these characters.


There is one characters who fails to obtain the sympathetic attention of the author since he fails to express himself in any way and we are denied any provisions to enter his mental either, the character is a gardener who tends the grounds being oblivious to changing landholders. The enigmatic gardener reveals himself only through interludes between the chapters (which reminds me of The Waves by Virginia Woolf, since its sturucture is similar to that of Visitation), which underlines the passing of time and perhaps it also signifies that life goes on no matter what, and starts again from the scracth after every adversity in sync with the Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model of Roger Penrose. The monotonous acts of the gardener in the 'Garden of Eden' seem to foster the feeling of mundanity, however, only with the passing time, one gets to understand his importance in keeping this sacred land intact amidst the vagaries of life and humanity.


The central character of the book has to be the place by the lake in Brandenburg which has been ripped apart, time and again, by the succession of occupants amidst the political crisis of German world, a country which hides dark secrets of human miseries under its sheath of enigma and gloom. The great lake remains the mute spectator and witness, seemingly unfazed by the tempo of time, to the various distortions and transformations taking place across the dimension of time.

Today can be today, it might also be yesterday or twenty years ago, and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday, and just as much, the laughter of twenty years ago, time appears to be at her beck and call, like a house in which she can enter now this room, now that.




link: source

Jenny Erpenback also uses repetitions of situations and expressions, which reminds me of Thomas Bernhard who uses repetition as a literary device to give a rhythmic effect to his prose, while Erpenbeck uses it to intensify the melancholic reality of the life. We watch with primal fear the gut-wrenching tale of the end of Jewish couple during the Holocaust wherein the brutality is portrayed with stark immediacy without any restraint. The picturesque scene of starvation of a young girl in a closet in the Warsaw ghetto is no less kind-hearted either. The prose of the book is as enigmatic as the book itself and gets under your skin once you immerse yourself in it, only to get untethered after 150 odd pages. The stories are weaved in and out of time wherein both past and present are conveyed alternatively like rippling waves. The death and the Holocaust are one of the foremost themes the book deals with, but perhaps in a more calm and toned-down way as if to convey that everything is transient in life, and that life springs up from death, and death from life.



Though the book may be modest as far as the number of pages are concerned but certainly not in its scope. The prose is dense in a sense that each sentence explores multiple possibilities before settling into ones it underlines, the phrase brings up the image of pulsating and spellbinding sentences of Laszlo Krasznahorkai. It appears as if the poetic sensibilities are infused in the thoughts of the characters who try to carve out their existence through the sacred space of the lake house by reverberating on the membrane of time to produce an elegant literary mosaic wherein past is always embedded in the present, only to divulge itself time and again as if both past and present occupy the same space on the membrane of time. The apparitions from the past may be lying somewhere in the present time, which may reveal themselves anytime like ghosts of memories of extended existence of bygones times Although we understand that there is always a bias in world literature towards English language, but the book stands firm amidst this mayhem as one of the finest examples in the contemporary literature.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

TRANSITI



La lingua scelta da Jenny Erpenbeck in Voce del verbo andare risultava semplice, diretta, trasparente.
Qui è invece simile all’acqua del lago sulla cui riva si svolge l’intera vicenda: increspata, sfuggente, quasi oscura. Richiede ben altro impegno di lettura.
Ma è anche probabilmente più raffinata, se non altro nella struttura narrativa che ruota intorno a un appezzamento di terreno, all’inizio un bosco, che lambisce un lago del Brandeburgo, stato della Germania nel nord est del paese. Potsdam ne è la capitale, Berlino non ne fa parte giuridicamente e amministrativamente, ma ne costituisce il centro geografico.



Terreno che un proprietario, il sindaco del paese (scoltetto), lascia in eredità alla quarta figlia, che per qualche ragione sceglie di suicidarsi nell’acqua del lago, proprio su quella riva.
E quindi, la terra, e la vicenda hanno una partenza drammatica.
Non sarà certo meno drammatico il percorso fino all’oggi finale quando la casa del lotto viene demolita nel capitoletto d’epilogo.
Prima di arrivare a tanto la vedremo erigere, trasformare, assisteremo al costante quieto ed efficace lavoro del giardiniere, personaggio silenzioso che attraversa tutta la storia e serve tutti i padroni che si susseguono.



Perché quel pezzo di terra, con quello che contiene, e cioè la casa, il pontile, il giardino, il bosco e il frutteto, la rimessa delle barche e quella degli attrezzi, nel corso della storia, che Erpenbeck sa far diventare Storia, si trasforma e s’adatta ai tempi. Il giardiniere innaffia, pota, sega, innesta, pianta e trapianta, sposta, costruisce, vernicia, in un’attività incessante, finché a causa di una caduta deve ritirarsi a presenza più marginale, meno incisiva, ma sempre spettatore. E forse il vero silenzioso narratore.



Il titolo originale Heimsuchung ha significato più composito di quello italiano, che però non è scelto affatto male, rende bene l’idea, e la interpreta.
L’originale tedesco contiene più significati, e non facile da spiegare. Mi pare di capire che si possa intendere come il penetrare in una casa, causando danni, provocando dolore, mettendo in moto la punizione divina, e il destino che fatalmente colpisce.
Quello che credo sia certo è che contiene afflizione, dolore, e rovina.
Caratteristiche che direi appartengono ala storia contenuta nel romanzo.



Dopo un prologo nel quale Erpenbeck condensa ventiquattromila anni di storia naturale in due pagine, un battito di ciglia, uno schiocco di dita, si passa al cuore del romanzo, diviso in undici capitoli con undici personaggi che qui sono protagonisti, lì sono invece comparse, entrano, escono, appaiono, ritornano.
Con loro Erpenbeck va avanti e indietro nel tempo, racconta il prima e poi il dopo, l’effetto anticipa la causa, prima il ricordo e poi l’evento, ma anche no, può invece scegliere il percorso più logico e lineare, si abbandona a frequenti ripetizioni come se volesse trasformare il suo racconto in una filastrocca, racconta piccole storie personali, storie di gente comune, secondaria, fragile, e attraverso di loro racconta il novecento tedesco, il secolo breve ma particolarmente violento, la guerra, quella Grande, i nazisti, gli ebrei, la guerra, la seconda mondiale, l’arrivo dell’Armata Rossa, la terra che passa di mano, diviene DDR, e poi il Muro cade, l’ovest si avvicina.



Per quanto storia squisitamente tedesca, Erpenbeck sa trasmetterla dando la sensazione che sia la storia di tutti noi, del mondo intero. E grazie alla scelta della lingua e del tono, la violenza, presente, tremenda, è però meno brutale, meno feroce, si ha l’impressione che faccia meno rumore, e il sangue scorra più silenzioso.

In attesa che nello stesso posto venga costruita una nuova casa, il paesaggio torna per qualche tempo al suo aspetto originario.

[Jibran · Rating 5 out of 5]

The protagonist of the novel is a house, a lakeside property outside Berlin, which has witnessed history's mood-swings from its origins as a pine forest owned by a local town mayor back in the 1600s CE down to our present times when the knocking down of the Berlin Wall forced it to change its inhabitants once again. Before I say more I’d like to say a few words about our own house (a landed estate actually) located in what is today central Pakistan, to which I had been comparing the house outside Berlin as I read the book.

My family’s permanent address has not changed for the last +/- 350 years. My ancestors came from a town 150 km away and have lived here ever since, although in recent times many of us have moved out to big cities and to other countries, in search of new lives, but have always endeavoured to return to our place of origin every now and then, especially on festive occasions like Eid, and once every few years if living abroad.

The oldest part of the house dates from 1870s and the rest of what stands today was built and added in the 1930s. This latter addition was done by demolishing an old extended section that was originally built sometime in the early 1700s on fallow land. An uncle of mine added the latest amendments, a new men’s parlour and few guestrooms, in 2000s, in the oldest part atop a hummock which my grandfather had left to his elder brother and moved to a newer construction in the 1930s.

I can give more details, of constructions, additions, demolitions, caving-ins, earthquakes, Persian tilework, old furniture built to last generations (the old charpoys my grandmother had brought in her dowry, still in good condition after minor repairs); of births and deaths, disputes and disagreements, wars and famines, the place changing hands from Mughal India to an independent princely state, then from British India into Pakistan, through which generations of its inhabitants have passed. Many things have happened during that long stretch of time but no upheaval or misfortune has been great enough to dislodge us from our estate.

But humanity has a quarrel with reality, having for eons rejected definitions of it while seeking, with the craving of an addict, one more new interpretation, whilst destroying the world in its stubborn refusal to learn from history, all that presumably for the benefit of humankind. The house in Ms Erpenbeck’s novel is located at a place which has seen the worst of European history pass through its doors, defiling its peace, trampling its serenity, destroying its meadows, and, in a cruel joke, turning the lake as a dead end for the escapees than a spot of leisurely activity for holidayers.

There is a strong sense of déjà vu in each of the stories of its characters and their families, related at one time or another to the house, who have fought or traded the right to own and live on the property with each other sometimes on pain of expulsion, at times by force of exigency, yet at others when the right of ownership was first taken away, and then given back, in a back-and-forth circus of the last one hundred years, depending on which power system happened to prevail at the time. And amazingly, Ms Erpenbeck’s language corresponds closely to the confusions of history as it constructs itself, then disintegrates, and again assembles in a slightly altered formation, with a degree of repetition informing the similarities between its long line of inhabitants, as if words were recalcitrant banshees brought up in a knot to fill the air with their endless cries.

The new world is to devour the old one, the old one puts up a fight, and now new and old are living side by side in a single body. Where much is asked, more is left out.

August '16

[Helga · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

It’s so dark that you cannot even see your own words.

This is a story about a house and its persistence and perseverance in the face of calamities, the passage of time, the stain left by memories both good and bad and the traces of the people who occupied it during the years pre and post WWII.

The house is one, but the characters are many, most of them referred to as the Architect, the Friend, the Visitor, the Grandmother, the Gardener and so on.
The story begins as the house is being built and the flowers are being planted.
Later the house is confiscated and then sold (illegally) to another family after its original Jewish family are forced to flee Germany.

The house witnesses many happy moments and also unhappy ones. But could it withstand the test of time?

Visitation is a confusing book. The style is poetic and often reminded me that of Jon Fosse.
You should read it real careful and slow and because most of the characters aren’t named, sometimes you are not sure if the character you are reading about belongs to the past or the present or is a ghost or is real.

In the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.

[Fionnuala]

Imagine a geologist examining a cross section of a landscape. He would point out why this layer of rock is so compressed and why that one is less so, why this layer of gravel was trapped just there and what the shape and age of those fossils indicate. He would read the layers of the landscape as if he were reading a history book with illustrations.

Jenny Erpenbeck reads the layers of twentieth century Germany in a similar way. Just as pockets of petrified sand beneath bedrock can still display a wave-like pattern, immortalising the winds that blew accross the water which covered the sand long ago, Erpenbeck’s analysis is sewn through with heart stopping glimpses of turbulent passages in the lives of real people during significant moments in that period.

The book which results from this examination resembles a piece of art more than a traditional story. She extracts sections from almost every decade of the twentieth century and overlays them to see the patterns which emerge, just as soil overlays sand and sand overlays rock, or vice versa as occurs in the geologically unusual Märkisches Meer area outside Berlin to which the book is a kind of monument. It is not for nothing that she quotes Georg Buchner on the fly-leaf: As the day is long and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other.

There is one particular theme that she returns to constantly and which is beautifully symbolised by an old wooden door (incongruously leading to a broom cupboard), a door which is decorated with twelve scenes depicting the Garden of Eden. Germany had it all, she seems to say, wealth, culture, traditions, the horn of plenty. But it wasn’t enough:

Whether it was ’38 or’39, or perhaps 1940 when they began to use the dock belonging to the abandoned house next door, and when her husband built the boathouse beside the dock - she’s no longer sure when that was. Surely he hadn’t built the boathouse until the next-door property belonged to them, but when was that? Summer after summer swimming, sunbathing, and picking raspberries at the edge of the woods...and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday...While she was spending her whole life laughing, her blond hair imperceptibly turned white...Today or yesterday, she is sitting with friends around a large pot in which crabs are floating, crabs she caught herself, gripping them firmly behind the neck, and later boiled until they turned red. Eating such a crab is not simple. First you twist the creature’s head off and suck its juices, then you rip out the claws and use a tiny skewer to pull out the meat.

The abandoned house with the paradise-paneled door is a symbol for a Germany that is gone; no one has and no one ever will become old within the shelter of its walls. In summer, he always took one last swim before leaving...When he will have swum here for the last time is something he no longer knows. Nor does he know whether the German language contains a verb form that can manage the trick of declaring the past the future.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 3-star level of enjoyment, but with 5-star prose, and 5-star moments:

This reminded me a little of Susan Vreeland’s, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, in that it’s a poetic movement through time by way of an object; in Vreeland’s, a painting, in this, a house on German land. And however linear our experience of time, this felt more like an art exhibit to me than a novel, where certain pieces by the same artist captivate and move, others delight, and others leave you flat at a glance, and you just want to move on - although the talent is clear.

The book takes you through German history from poignant moments in the inhabitants’ lives, with one character - the gardener - serving as an anchor, or a rest and return, as he tends to the land. We watch him transform through time, as well as the land, and the overall feeling is that however temporary our lives, we leave behind some intangible meaning.

My favorite chapter, The Girl, the single one inside a structure that is not this house, was profoundly moving, and worth reading on its own.

If you love poetic, spare prose, and appreciate intelligent literature that creates a connection with a society through its history, but rarely connects you emotionally to the to inner life of specific characters, this could be 5 stars for you. I’m just needing to connect emotionally more than ever these days…

PS I often read 2-3 books at a time, and I would not recommend that with this book.

[Agnieszka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long time ago, in different time, in other era, when the world was young yet, when these hillocks were part of huge mountain range a glacier went through, crushing everything on its way, changing lay of the land, curving rocks and forming basins which filled with water. Former inhabitants, lions and saber-toothed tigers gone and then we entered on the scene, embracing that land and naming lake between hills the Sea of the Mark Brandenburg.

Between silent green hummocks, amid pine grooves and alder forests, nearby the lake there was a house. It was built by Berlin architect for his young wife. He used to think that it would last for ever, that they spend there the whole life. But what exactly does it mean that whole life ?

On the doors still fly colorful birds, flowers are blooming, grapes hanging. Garden of Eden, in twelve colored panes which beauty makes you to forget that behind them is only a common broom cupboard. Creaky stairs on the second, seventh and penultimate stage. Wife’s room as always smelling of mint and camphor. Dressing room with ingenious passageway into his atelier. On the upstairs from where stretched a view on the rose bed, sandy road, shiny surface of the water the tiny bird soldered to the railing.

A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. Homestead. A house made to measure according to the needs of its master .

Each and every year the gardener used to come and depending on the time of year planted, trimmed, watered, fertilized, cleared, weeded.

...he lives alone in an abandoned hunting lodge at the edge of the woods , he's always lived there , everyone in the village knows him , and yet he is only ever referred to by both young people and old as The Gardener , as though he had no other name .

There was a time and there was a life. And then time began to leak out and there was no way to stop it. And life began to shrink down to the size of a tiny dark cubbyhole. But while sitting in the darkness one could still remember that house and the lake, that one could be sure the world still existed. But what if there was no one who would remember us ? What when we finally disappear ? Who then will know about the world?

Doris, daughter of Ernst and Elizabeth .

On the wooden platform one can still hear the patter of bare feet, in the bedroom still lingers faint smell of mint and camphor, from the living room on the downstairs still coming the sound of a typewriter.

As the day is old and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other .

Trucks already departed, taking away tons of rotten debris, decaying wood, broken glass. The bees have left their hives. The gardener has disappeared. In the place where once stood the house there is a gaping hole now so you can see the layers of the bygone years. Slate, clay, sand.

In the twisted pines wind is blowing. The lake is still lapping against the shore. But one day even it may disappear. Because long ago, in another time, in different life, when the world was still young even in the Sahara there was water too.

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh, i love it when i get to review a book that elizabeth has just reviewed. as though i am going to be able to add anything to the discussion except a weak echo of "i agree! this book is good!!"

so i will just quickly relate my experience with this book which is indeed pretty great.

but not at first.

at first it was killing me with boredom. i have been reading too much teen fiction as of late, and there, the pacing is perfect for hot summer and slipping attention span. this book is NOT for those who can't pay attention. this is some highly concentrated, deliberate prose. and at first, before the human characters come into it, it seems to be just words words words, being boring.

but the significance will become clear later.

aside: i recently went to the movies to see general orders no. 9. and it was a small artsy theater, and the host of the evening (who i did not find smug, but connor said was, a little) prefaced the evening by saying "it is hard to get people to come out for a film like this, a film without human characters on a friday night when you could be going to see the green lantern" and that was supposed to make us feel good about ourselves, like we had made the informed choice for fiber over candy bars.

but seriously?
that movie is soooo boring. yes, city is bad, country is good, progress is problematic, i get it. take a note from koyaanisqatsi and have good music.

but i digress. the only reason i bring it up is because the arc of the book is similar to the arc of the movie, and starting this book the day after i saw the movie, i was apprehensive when it began with a glacier, and then moved on to a whole lot of talk about plants and slow growth. bad, synchronicity, bad!

line from film:

deer trail becomes
indian trail becomes
county road.

but in this book:

open land becomes
family house becomes
nazi toilet

that is not a quote, that is just the way the story progresses. and the book is just a damn sight better at doing what needs to be done. the details are perfection. the tone is completely detached, so whether the scene is someone pruning a tree or someone dying in a gas chamber, there is an emotional remove that only serves to make the reader's emotions more powerful. how she managed to write such a highly concentrated book is beyond me, truly. it is luminous (did i just use the word luminous to describe a book?? i think i did)

this book should be read slowly and carefully and thoughtfully. and then it should be read again. she is really that good.

greg's review is also good, and caused a great deal of fighting, which is funny, even if a lot of it has been deleted.

come to my blog!

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Heimsuchung" attempts to rewind German history in fast motion and examine certain points in time through a magnifying glass. This results in neither meaningful characterization nor an original plot, so that the depth of the novel resembles the shallows of the Brandenburg lake on which the house—the central setting of the story and its secret protagonist—is located.

The plot spans from the end of the 19th to the end of the 21st century against the backdrop of various families and generations: the land by the lake is sold, the house is built, and scenes take place in the house that prototypically depict certain chapters of German history. The only constant - apart from the building and its environment - is the mythical figure of the gardener, who contrasts the rapid progression of time with an almost primal staticity, even though he also has to vanish.

In this respect, “Heimsuchung” fails on several levels and is reminiscent of elitist attempts to come to terms with the past.

But.

The short scenes are so vividly crafted that they linger in the memory. In seemingly inconspicuous subordinate clauses, the brutality and horror of different times break into the plot, and the artfully woven connections between the characters only reveal their full significance upon a second reading.

“Heimsuchung”- even the title is ambivalent ("Heimsuchung" = haunting, "Heim-Suchung" = looking for a home) - consists of many stones that only reveal the building they form together when viewed as a whole. Here, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the space gains particular significance against the backdrop of time: its passing is suspended by its preservation in the book.

[niklas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Furchtbar langweilig, unverständlich, protzig.

Verstehe um Gottes Willen nicht wieso das hessische Kultusministerium dieses Buch für den deutsch Unterricht Pflicht macht.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps eternal life already exists during a human lifetime, but since it looks different from what we're hoping for - something that transcends everything that's ever happened - since it looks instead like the old life we already knew, no one recognizes it.

Yet, Jenny Erpenbeck demonstrates here that it is possible to capture the universal by examining the particular (like zooming into a Mandelbrot fractal image), amazingly in only a couple of hundred pages of personal histories succeeding each other in a patch of land by a lake in Bavaria. For me, reading the novel was like looking at a Seurat painting, like watching a time-lapse video or listening to a major symphony. I will try explain each analogy.


A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Pointilism is a late form of Impressionism, where the viewer starts from a distance, looking at ghostly siluettes like dancing shadows moving in a sunny landscape. As he comes closer and closer the observer discovers how the painting is created by thousands and thousands of dots in contrasting colours placed close to one another. To use a more recent analogy, I have seen on the net huge posters assembled from individual portraits of people of different skin colours achieving the same effect. Erpenbeck made it easier for me to make the association with Seurat, as in the very first chapter a young girl wanders into a forest clearing and has a vision of ghostly figures strolling through the grass, dressed in costumes from different time periods:

"As the day is old and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other. (Georg Buchner)

The novel becomes a dance of succesive generations leaving behind afterimages of their time spent in the meadow by the lake, making the present a pointilist overlay that needs to be observed from a distance in order to perceive its deeper truth. Also from one of the first stories, this dance of generations is beautifully captured in the oral traditions and superstitions that are probably older than Christianity, going back to our common tribal memory. A collection of rules and traditions that gives structure and strength to a community by regulating all major events of a lifetime, from birth to weddings to funerals. This treasure chest of ancestral wisdom is getting lost in the uniformity of popular culture and globalization, but I grew up in a neighborhood when the parents and grandparents generation still had knowledge of all these quirky and enchanting customs:

When a woman gets married, she must not sew her own dress. The dress may not even be made in the house where she lives. It must be sewn elsewhere, and during the sewing a needle must not be broken. The fabric for a wedding dress must not be ripped, it must be cut with scissors. If an error is made while the fabric is being cut, this piece of fabric may no longer be used, instead a new piece of the same material must be purchased.

another example:

If a maiden wishes to know if she will marry soon, she must knock on the wall of the chicken coop during the night of New Year's Eve. If the first creature to emerge is a hen, she's out of luck, but if the rooster responds first, her wish will be granted.

These traditions endured for a long time unchanged, there wouldn't be much of a story if they were the sole focus of the book. Instead, the author chooses to zoom in on the period of rapid transition, from late nineteen century to early in the third millenium, when the whole fabric of society is ripped apart by world wars and major political movements, by alienation of newer generations from their roots and by the decay of the old fashioned system of values and ethics.

Given the big picture, the composite image I have talked about until now, I might leave the impression that individual lives count for little in the master plan, but the reverse is true, as each life contains within itself the seeds of eternity. An eternity defined not by stagnation but by birth, growth and decay. One after another, they enter the meadow, dance for a while in the sunshine, then bow out and make space for the next visitor: a rich farmer and his four daughters, an arhitect, his wife, a Jewish cloth manufacturer, a young girl who hides from the Nazis, a writer, an exile from a different country, a pair of teenage friends, some tenants, an illegal squatter. Most of them have names, but names are less important than their interaction with the place. The place having a life of its own, starting with untamed forest, then a summer house, then a houseboat, a dock, a workshop, a formal garden, a ruin.

A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. Homestead. A house made to measure according to the needs of its master. Eating, cooking, sleeping, bathing, defecating, children, guests, car, garden. Calculating all these whethers, all these thises and thats, in wood, stone, glass, straw and iron. Setting out courses for lives, flooring beneath feet for corridors, vistas for eyes, doors for silence.

Linking the place and the people together is a mythical figure, the gardener, for me an avatar of a detached deity whose only concern is maintaining the continuity of life. He's the most important figure in the whole novel, so maybe I should try to capture him in more detail.

For this I'll use the time lapse analogy. You may have seen the result in wildlife documentaries: a photographer sets his camera on a tripod then, with a special remote timer, takes a series of photos at fixed intervals. When the hundreds of photos are reassembled in sequence you obtain a fast forward movie of clouds running like wild horses across the sky, of a budding flower opening its petals or of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, of the sun rising and setting in a couple of seconds, of seasons chasing one another with a tree in the center of the image blooming, reddening in autumn and then losing all its leaves. The prologue of the novel stretches the timeline even wider, following the slow dance of the glaciers as they shape the landscape, flattening the plain, leaving behind a talus of rubble that will be covered with soil and forest, and then parrallel grooves that will fill with water to create a lake. The speed slows down as we approach the XIX century, and the timelapse follows the coming and going of the seasons, the rising of the house and of its garden, the slow decay and dissolution that follows unerringly after birth and growth. The gardener is not only the caretaker of the place, he is also the indifferent observer who doesn't get mixed up in family dramas, in wars or in politics. Following a rhythm as old as the stars, he racks up the deadwood, cuts the old trees and stacks the kindling for winter, spreads the manure, digs he holes for new trees or flowerbeds, waters he lawn two times a day, morning and sunset - regular like clockwork or like the breath of the oceans from where life first emerged.

The gardener wheels up the next barrowful of soil and dumps it out. To tame the wilderness and then make it intersect with culture - that's what art is, the householder says. [...] To avail oneself of beauty regardless of where one finds it.

I am reminded of a phrase from Malcolm Lowry about a derelict garden in Cuernavaca. He too sees our destiny not as conquerors of time and nature but as gardeners, temporary tenants (Visitors) whose task is not to destroy, but to nurture and build (beauty, art, new life)

Le gusta este jardin? Que es suyo? Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!

I've talked about geological, seasonal and cyrcadian rhythms, about the drumming of waves, the whispers of the wind or the loud declamations of cannons. All these bring me to the metaphor of the novel as a symphony, where each individual character(the farmer's daughter, the arhitect, the writer, the gardener) sings his theme on his own instrument, but together they produce much more than their melodies: a tarantella of folk dance, an andante over the peaceful waters of the lake, a presto of cavalry charge and artillery, a requiem for a house in winter, an ode to the joy of living. Again the individual lives get lost in the bigger sound of the orchestra, but that doesn't mean that they are not important, that their theme songs do not reflect and enrich the basic structure of the opera. Here are the last quotes that I saved from the novel. All could be verses of songs, or sketched ideas for a haunting melody:

"If I came to you,
O woods of my youth,
could you
Promise me peace
once again?" (Friedrich Holderlin)

This is the key to the garden
for which three girls are waiting.
The first is named Binka,
the second Bibeldebinka.
The third's name is Zickzettzack Nobel de
Bobel de Bibel de Binka.
Then Binka took a stone
and struck Bibeldebinka's leg bone.
Then Zick, Zett, Zack,
Nobel de Bobel de Bibel de Binka
began to weep and moan.

The dandelions are the same here as back home, and so are the larks.

They knew nothing more beautiful than just letting the wind carry them along. Sailing is a beautiful thing.

In the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.

That's what I will take with me from the reading of Jenny Erpenbeck masterful novel : an impression of light and shadow in a meadow, a timelapse of a house and a forest, a romantic symphony that says much more than words could ever capture. And, as with all those major Romantic symphonies and concerts, I'm sure a re-read will reveal more hidden treasures, deeper meaning and brighter beauty.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

One word: brilliant. I just had some conversation on another review of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio . This book is similar, but more masterful. Sold as a novel, it is really more of a novel in stories, centered around a plot of land on a lake and a house that apparently German writer Erpenbeck's family once owned. This accounts for the visceral details and the heavy emotion that hangs around the events that occur during the historical time period in which this book takes place outside Berlin. It is somewhat autobiographical.

It takes a while to get into the book. At least, it took several chapters for me to get invested. So if you pick it up, keep going to the end. You will be rewarded, promise. This is the kind of writing that expands your mind. Don't give up. From the architect who builds the house, to his wife, to their daughter, to the neighbors (most of all to the Jewish neighbors, some of the most powerful passages I have ever read), to the gardener who weaves in and out of this desecrated Garden of Eden like a dispassionate god, Erpenbeck's experimental language and philosophical statements left me in awe. She has her own style and voice, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, who could bend time and events in one breathless paragraph.

This is a hugely talented writer, who is lucky to have found the perfect translator in Susan Bernofsky. A huge thanks to Bernofsky for bringing this masterpiece to the English-speaking world. It's a book one can read over and over and get something new out of it each time. In fact, I am going to go back to the beginning again now that I know what she was trying to achieve....

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The central character for this novel is a house, a house by a lake in east Germany. It begins in the 1930s when the house is owned by a Jewish family. Through the various occupants of the house with all of whom the author creates an emotional engagement we experience the turbulent history of Germany in the second half of the 20th century. The one constant is the eccentric gardener who lives in an abandoned hunting lodge. I loved this beautifully imaginative and wise novel.

[JimZ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was frustrated by the first book that I had read by Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days, but I had heard that “Visitation” was very good and so I procured the book….and once again am frustrated. The same sense of frustration the first time I read her. Which leads me to conclude that I would be best to avoid reading anything by her again because odds are her style of writing will once again frustrate me. I know she is a good writer…by the awards/prizes she has garnered and the praise she has received from literary critics. To me she writes obliquely. Like…please just tell me what the hell you are trying to convey. Stop hiding behind the elegant polished prose. ☹ There I said it… ☹

I think part of my problem is that I am not steeped in the history of Germany. In this book there are a series of stories of people that inhabit a house in Brandenburg, Germany from before World War II into World War II to after the war and the formation of East Germany and West Germany, and then the fall of the Berlin wall and thereafter. Just as in the other book I read by Erpenbeck, there are short sections that separate the stories…in that book they were called ‘intermezzos’…in this book the mini-sections are entitled “The Gardener”…in which a description is given of a gardener who apparently lives in the gardener’s shed throughout the entire time period in which all the occupants have lived and left the house. He tends to the grounds surrounding the house. I’m sure there is a meaning to “the gardener”…maybe he is a constant in the face of all the different occupants of the house before, during, and after World War II.

I counted 10 stories to the book, although the back cover of the book says there are “stories of 12 individuals who make their home here”…I have no idea what is meant by that in that there are more than 12 individuals who made their home there. Besides the writing which I found to be obtuse at times and I must admit, long-winded at times, was my confusion as to who was living in the house from story to story…was the person or people Germans loyal to Hitler, Germans who were Jews, Russians who invaded Germany, Russians who moved to Germany, Germans who had lived elsewhere during the war and now moved back to Germany….and across stories there were references to former occupants of the house…and despite my keeping notes I couldn’t make heads nor tails of half of what was in this book. Aye-yi-yi.

Notes:
• After reading the review of Michel Faber (see below), he did remind me of a particular story in this book, and I agree with him wholeheartedly….this was a story (entitled “The Girl”) that was a gut puncher and it was excellent, and here is what he had to say: “a chapter covering the fate of Doris, one of the exiled Jews, shifts the action to an abandoned house in the Warsaw ghetto. This 11-page episode, set mostly inside a pitch-dark closet, is one of the most powerful distillations of the Holocaust I've ever encountered in fiction: it deserves to be widely anthologized as a classic short story.”
• The Guardian ranked Visitation #90 in its list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Reviews:
• From Michel Faber (a fave author of mine) who loved this book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• From Susan Chou: https://www.npr.org/2013/11/08/243970...
• From a blog site: http://www.ronslate.com/on-visitation...
• https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/b...

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning.

A grand summer house on a lake just outside Berlin is the focal point of twelve stories of those who arrest a space there from the turmoil in central Europe between the Weimar Republic and the post Re-unification period, with all the shifts and dislocations as ideologies and regimes pass. Attempts to fix themselves to a piece of earth are fruitless. In between each chapter we have the constant gardener, whose pragmatic planting, pruning and propagating is described in a tone of incantation, in the quiet repetitive cadence of ritual: "In summer he sets out sprinklers on both lawns, twice each day they will bow to one side and then the other for half an hour, once early in the morning and once at dusk, meanwhile he waters the flowerbed, roses and shrubs." A relief, a foil, a contrast to the forces of man-made history whirling and sliding around him.
The set-up has been compared to Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, but the treatment here is marked by finesse and subtlety, not adjectives that I would dream of using anywhere near Mr Mawer's attempt to get a contract in Hollywood (I never heard he'd managed?). Where Mawer conveyed coincidence and corny sentimentality that turned the vagaries of history into melodrama, Erpenbeck's prose floats and shimmers like the lake at its feet, shot through with glinting sparks of light, with treasure beneath the surface just like the silver cutlery sunk in the shallows at the centre of the lake to hide it from the invading Red Army.
The most impressive chapter in the book is the only one that takes place away from the house. As has happened before in that house, and will happen again, a young woman is hidden inside a cupboard, trying to survive by becoming invisible. However this time it is the granddaughter of the Jewish cloth manufacturer who once owned the next door plot: she is hiding in the Warsaw ghetto. All of the holocaust is condensed into twelve pages of heart-rending, perfectly pitched prose that alone deserves the accolades that this book has garnered. "For three years the girl took piano lessons, but now, while her dead body slides down into the pit, the word piano is taken back from human beings, now the backflip on the high bar that the girl could perform better than her schoolmates is taken back, along with all the motions a swimmer makes, grasping for crayfish is taken back, as well as the study of knots for sailing, all these things are taken back into uninventedness, and finally, last of all, the name of the girl herself is taken back, the name no one will ever again call her by: Doris." Those deaths that wiped out both individual lives and humanity and civilization and culture. Everything turned to dust in the mouth. I wept.

[Patrizia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una casa in riva a un lago nei pressi di Berlino, un giardiniere e undici proprietari diversi prendono vita nelle pagine di questo splendido quanto spietato romanzo, in cui destini privati si intrecciano alla Storia della Germania degli ultimi 150 anni.
"Costruire è attaccare la propria vita alla terra", mettere radici. Si invecchia, il tempo scorre, scandito dai lavori stagionali del giardiniere, unica figura che ritroviamo - significativamente - sino alla fine.
La casa diventa "Heim", focolare, dimora "terza pelle", luogo del desiderio a cui tornare col pensiero nei momenti più duri, testimone silenziosa che attraversa il tempo e lo manipola, lo sospende, a tratti sembra riavvolgerlo, nel convulso snodarsi degli eventi.
Non ha affanni la casa, come non ne ha il lago che, imperturbabile, cambia colore a seconda della luce e custodisce segreti. È il compito dell'acqua, che attrae perché “al di sopra di un lago il cielo è sempre così vuoto, perché tutti, ogni tanto, hanno voglia di non vedere nulla.”

[annina · Rating 1 out of 5]

wieso man beschlossen hat, dass dieses buch in der schule behandelt werden muss, bleibt mir ein rätsel.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dissolution

This prose poem by Jenny Erpenbeck is clearly art of the highest order, so much so that I feel a little inadequate reviewing it. It is the story of a house looking over a lake in Brandenburg, not far from Berlin. Built by a young architect at the turn of the century, it sees two world wars and several different regimes. Its successive inhabitants come and mean to stay—but increasingly they go, due to age, death, or exile. But the house and land are clearly the main characters; like the people, they grow, change, and eventually decay, but on a much longer time-span. In between each of the main chapters, there is a short section headed simply "The Gardener," focusing on the man who looks after the property, and the detailed routine of pruning, cultivating, managing the round of the seasons. For example, we watch an orchard being planted, bearing fruit, growing to maturity, succumbing to insect infestation, and finally cut down. All this over the course of a terrible century in a tragic land.

By writing with such precision about surroundings—not merely the house and grounds, but local customs, legal ordinances, detail of all kinds—Erpenbeck places human drama at a distance, and creates a time-scale in which even tragic events seems only temporary. Not for nothing does she open the book with "Approximately twenty-four thousand years ago" and ends with "the landscape, if ever so briefly, resembles itself once more." One of the meanings of the German title Heimsuchung is indeed Visitation, as in the Visitation of the Virgin Mary—a curious choice by the otherwise excellent translator Susan Bernofsky, though it does reflect the grace that permeates this book. But another is Infestation, which is much more apt. There are natural infestations here, such as martens and dry rot; human infestations such as the soldiers of the Red Army defecating in the drawing rooms; political infestations (though kept pretty much offstage) such as the Third Reich and Soviet occupation; and through it all, the sense that the building of this house is itself little more than a passing infestation of an enduring landscape.

With one significant exception, none of the characters are given proper names; instead, they have labels such as: "The Architect," "The Red Army Officer," "The Visitor," or "The Childhood Friend." The only names are given to a family of Jewish origin who either go into exile or are killed. Their chapters are the most heart-breakingly succinct evocation of the Holocaust that I have ever read, an aching poetry of promise and loss, punctuated by a few brutal phrases near the end. There are moment of violence elsewhere also—a bizarre sexual encounter in a darkened closet, two horrorstruck children watching the rape of a third—but they take second place to the persistent aura of longing and of loss. Home, the first part of the German title, is everything here, but it is more about leaving or losing one's home, and even the episodes of return are fraught with sadness. Erpenbeck quotes some lines of Hölderlin as an epigraph:

If I came to you,
O woods of my youth, could you
Promise me peace once again?

But she answers this in her next quotation, an Arabic proverb:

When the house is finished, Death enters.

To do the book justice, I would need to read it at least twice more. And probably to compare the original German, though Susan Bernofsky totally convinces me with her sensitive handling of language. For Erpenbeck writes like poetry or music, where phrases echo and amplify one another within a paragraph, a chapter, and the entire novel. I would want to read it all in one sitting, to enjoy the play of these references within a living whole. Then I would want to read it very slowly, with pencil in hand, to track the sequence of events and the ways in which the various characters relate to one another and to the house. But I suspect that Erpenbeck has precisely calculated the in-between state of a first reading, in which one senses the musical structure without tying it down, and feels the interconnectedness of the people without needing to reduce their lives to a linear story. This is a book like few others, a small masterpiece.

+ + + + + +

PS. I have now read both Erpenbeck's other short books to be published in English, which also deal with the pathology of the middle years of the last century, but in different ways. The stories in The Old Child (1999) are surreal or symbolic, and highly charged with sexuality or violence. The Book of Words (2004), while even more violent in implication, handles the subject obliquely, set in a distant country and seen through the eyes of a child. Both are eminently worth reading, but the poise and clarity of Visitation is something quite new.

PPS. And add to that now her most recent novel to be translated in English (although I started it when it first came out in German), The End of Days (2013). Like Visitation, this also covers most of the history of the century, though at greater length and through a very different narrative device, showing the many ways in which a given life might have been ended, but in fact was not.

PPPS (2017). I wish I could add Ms. Erpenbeck’s most recent novel to appear in English, Go, Went, Gone, to this victory parade. But although she continues her examination of the morality of state power, she is just a little too close to the subject of this one—the plight of refugees in Germany today—to find some device of literary distancing such as made the previous books so poetic.

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fact or fiction? This novel is not afraid to mix the two, from its opening sentence: Approximately twenty-four thousand years ago, a glacier advanced until it reached a large outcropping of rock that now is nothing more than a gentle hill above where the house stands to the final ones: Document bundle B 3. We request acknowledgement. I found this really interesting.

The chunk of land occupied by present-day Germany has seen human habitation for at least 20,000 years, and a great deal of information is available from about A.D. 800 onwards. From this wide span of history, this book, like so many others, focuses on the grim period roughly spanning the first half of the twentieth century. We are all familiar with the outline of this period; Erpenbeck skillfully wrings pathos from her story by the very clear-eyed and dry style in which she writes. It is quite an achievement.

She employs a lot of tricks, mostly successfully. Note here the contrast between the bombastic landscape architect and the lowly gardener who reduces the architect's ideas to practice:

The landscape architects says: light and shade, open spaces and thickly overgrown ones, looking down from above, looking up from below. With the edge of his shovel, the gardener distributes the soil evenly across the bed. The vertical and horizontal must stand in salutary relationship to one another, the householder says...To tame the wilderness and then make it intersect with culture -- that's what art is, the householder says. With the edge of his shovel, the gardener distributes the soil evenly across the bed.

There's a bit of internal rhyming there, with the repetition of spreading soil across the bed, and this turns up in several ways throughout the novel. Several descriptions find themselves popping up at different places, and literary springs tightened in the early chapters are released in the later ones.

This makes for interesting reading, and again with the facts:

When in 1939 Arthur and Hermine do apply for an exit visa after all, they sell Ludwig's property along with the dock and the bathing house for half its market value to the architect next door. On account of the profit he is making on this transaction, the architect pays the National Financial Authority a 6% De-Judification Gains Tax.

This is genius. Most of us are aware that Jewish citizens of Europe, those that survived, found that everything they'd owned before the Second World War had been seized, sold, auctioned off and was irretrievable. But part of the horror of this is the utter normalization required to set up a special tax for this activity -- something most readers, or certainly this reader, had never given any thought to.

Even urine, a commonplace if rarely discussed fluid, plays several key roles here, again in a very matter-of-fact way.

Not every trick was successful. The main chapter describing the Jewish experience from their point of view employed an odd way of referring to the characters that I suppose was intended to recall the dreary Old Testament verses, the ones that go on endlessly with "...and Hertus begat Schlom and Barachazzer, and Shlom begat Ruhid and Jebezee and Norbugat, and..." This might have been usefully employed for a couple of paragraphs, but over a long chapter, it dragged.

Finally, my own preferences lead to a four- rather than five-star rating, because this was first and foremost a self-conscious literary achievement -- a look-at-me sort of writing that, while always interesting and sometimes brilliant, detracts from the heart of the book. What my five-star books have in common is that you don't even notice the writing, because you're too busy being shaken silly by the story.

Nevertheless, I can recommend this strongly both on the strength of the tale as well as the interest afforded by the writing. It was extremely well executed.

I was led here by intriguing reviews from Ilse and Jennifer .

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about a small relatively unimportant piece of land in Germany and the people who happen to have some ties to that piece of land for a hundred years or so. It's just a piece of land alongside a lake. Except for some little bits on construction little changes physically on the piece of land, but being that it is in Germany, and in what would be called East Germany for about half of the 20th Century, and being what history is there are quite a few questions that can be explored just by making up stories about a simple piece of land alongside a picturesque lake.

Fill in my usual thoughts on memory and history and the holocaust and you'll get what could be the gist of my review.

The book deals with harsh things but it does so in a very delicate way. I don't meant that as a bad thing. I refer anyone who cares about how I might be (mis)using the term to see the William Gaddis quote in the quote section of my profile, and please ignore the typo in the middle of the quote that is all my doing.

That is my book review. Thank you for reading.

This is an aside.

The idea of place is tricky. What makes a place be designated as a place? Does it encompass all of the history and memory that attaches itself to a certain spatial location? Is it just the spatial location? What about a place that moves? Is there a necessary relation between physicality and place? Is a website a place? It has the word site in the word, and sites are places, right?

In the past week another of the possibly historical moments flared up on goodreads.com. Again, it involved chastising someone who may or may not have done something ethically wrong, or maybe more accurate it can be said that information about one person rubbed lots of other people the wrong way. Like the Ginnie fiasco from an earlier time, it's tough to say exactly what the person did wrong. Especially since no one involved seems to even know anyone who has been wronged by the chastised person.

My take on him (since no one is asking) is that he is a turd and he deserves what he gets. I can't give an answer why this is so. I can't even convince myself that my opinion is correct except that I feel it in my gut, the same way I feel that the Game guys are wrong for what they do and that racist skinheads should have the shit kicked out of them even if they haven't done anything yet. If I apply any kind of rigor to these opinions they fall weakly apart. Fortunately for the world my irrational opinions and what I think should be done to people who break my personal rules for conduct aren't enforced and all you really get for breaking them is a strict but generally silent censure in my head.

I never said why I think he's a turd though. It's not that he is a stalker or a sender of knives in the mail with instructions to use them as dildos; it's rather his response to Meredith, the whole (I'm not going to try to find this actual quote, you probably already know what I'm talking about anyway) 'oh I am the type of person who just can't stand to be involved in conflict so I just can't read these accusations anymore.' Anyone who uses this answer to accusations or in an argument is a turd. A turd who should be locked away in a room so that they can't communicate with anyone else since what they are in effect saying doing is trying to trump the argument or accusation through a side-stepping method that puts them on a moral high-ground and their opponent as muck-dwelling cretin. This is the same answer that has been used in the past by more than one person on goodreads.com threads to attempt a quick moral victory when all of their actual arguments had been destroyed. See for example Scott's attack on Karen's Known World review. Weak argument, name calling (degradation of character), more name calling, and then a quick bowing out of the fight by putting oneself above everyone else (see also Seth. See also Stephen (what is it with the S's here?)). That is what makes you a turd.

This whole thing will pass though.

In a year from now it will be mentioned with DoctorM-gate or whatever name it picks up and someone who maybe is a member of goodreads.com right now, but who doesn't know anyone involved in the drama but who is going to befriend people involved a few months from now will ask about who DoctorM is, or what Ginniegate was, and someone will bring this person up to speed. And then someone else will probably point out about how much better goodreads.com was then (now) then it is now (in the future), and someone else will threaten to quit being involved at all because the site was more fun back then, and even more interesting in an even farther back time, and some people involved now who just lurk and grumble then will come out of lurking and grumble about how much more interesting the reviews were then, and back then (now) they wrote interesting reviews, but now (in the future) they don't write anything anymore, but just grumble about the reviews being stupid these days. And then at another then even farther in the future someone will look back to the then of the not-so-distant future and say how much better it was, but point to the end of September 2010 as being the really awesome time, when there was community and interesting conversations all because of some pervy old dude who wanted young chicks to do themselves with gardening tools (the facts blur over time) and everyone in that farther in the future time sighs and says yes, that was when goodreads.com was fun and good, and they all sigh again and say it's all so idiotic and boring now. And so on and so on, and through it all it is the same place with subtle shifts and shit but it's only through memory that the meaning and importance is built and manipulated.

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes contact with a place transforms us. Erpenbeck traces for us German history in the last century through the lives and loves of people involved with a piece of land by a lake on which sits a summer house with an eyebrow window and a roof of thatch. This slim, quiet, extremely powerful novel carries with it the weight of change and allows us to inhabit history. There is a stillness, reserve, and lack of sentimentality about the story which paradoxically fills us with emotion. The house and gardens on the land by the lake are designed with love in mind, the windows framing the view. “A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing.” But when the second war came, “one could only pity a person who owned a piece of land and not a flying carpet.”

WWII books are so common that it takes something unusual to yank me from the torpor that descends upon me as I contemplate another trip through that wasted landscape. The last book which was able to do that for me was Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness. And now, Erpenbeck’s Visitation. I fear I have used all my superlatives when it comes to talking about books so that when I say "extraordinary" it doesn’t convey the truly astonishing clarity and craft the author exhibits.

Erpenbeck brings us something new: the war from the view of German citizens, broken as a citizenry when the Jews were removed, or, as in the case of ‘the architect and his wife’ living in the house they built by the lake, without much understanding. It hadn’t all been the architect’s land, to begin with. He’d acquired a large piece which included the boat house ("paid a full half of market value") from the cloth merchants, who had owned the parcel next door, allowing them to leave the country.

Hermine and Arthur, his parents.
He himself, Ludwig, the firstborn.
His sister Elizabeth, married to Ernst.
Their daughter, his neice, Doris.
Then his wife Anna.
And now the children: Elliot and baby Elizabeth, named for his own sister.

Most didn't make it out. The war intruded finally, on the land by the lake, in the form of invading Russians, at least one of whom left his seed to grow on the land by the lake.

But this is not just about war. We move from the Weimar Republic through the Second World War to the Fall of the Wall. This book is about that fourth dimension in architecture, time, and how that adds to height, width, length to make something enduring, or perhaps, not so much.

Any book of this quality must have a translator who can keep pace and give the work its intended gravitas. Sarah Bernofsky, the translator of this novel and three of Erpenbeck’s others, is Co-Chair of the PEN Translation Committee and has won several awards for her work. Most recently she shared the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Erpenbeck for her latest novel, The End of Days, a novel which takes on the theme "what if." Sometimes a life can change direction on the smallest incident.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 and 1/2 stars

I think maybe I would've given this 5 stars if I'd been able to read it straight through rather than in spurts while I was traveling. It's a prose poem of a novel, slim but encompassing the history of Germany, starting with a short prologue of the Ice Age to the building of a summer house in one particular wooded area with much more to follow. If I knew more of German history, I'm sure I would've gotten more out of it; but even without that knowledge, the ebb and flow of the seasons, and the possession and dispossession of the house and the land by owners and visitors is quite effective. Along with a focus on the "dirty" destructive effects of nature, the author doesn't shy away from the filth that emanates from humans, its helpless grittiness, its uses and its power.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An instant favorite. What I’m most impressed with is her ability to be so distant and cold in her poetic approach, yet somehow the overall effect is relatable, and very human. Often when I read books that are poetic in nature (see: Maud Martha, Deep North, even Silk) I feel disconnected from the characters by a veil of constructed beauty. But even though this book has all that beauty and construction and a huge bag of tricks to boot, I always felt emotionally involved. And even though she uses her bag of tricks (calling it that is a disservice to what’s going on here), it never feels heavy handed or show-offy. All of it is pulled off with subtlety, delicacy, careful pacing and craft, yet it never comes off as sterile.

The book starts off with these illuminating epigraphs:

As the day is long and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other. -- Marie in Woyzeck by Georg Buchner

If I came to you, / O woods of my youth, could you / Promise me peace once again? -- Holderlin

When the house is finished, Death enters. -- Arabic proverb

These quotes set the tone for what is about to be revealed, which is similar to seeing several photos of the same place superimposed onto one another, the people in it appearing like ghosts crossing over for a quick visit. Time is compressed in these narratives; the concern here is not only with objective linear time, but with time seen through the blurred lens of memory. And also with the disconnect between objective time (its brutal passing, regardless of us) and subjective time (our distortions, regardless of fact). The confusion that results is somewhat eerie. I’m having trouble coming up with examples, as she creates these effects over many pages. The chapter entitled “The Cloth Manufacturer” illustrates this very well, and can actually be read as an excellent standalone short story. Here is a sentence from that chapter:

I know, he, Ludwig, says, his father’s only son.

The chapters differ slightly in style depending on what each is saying, yet come together as a whole perfectly... and this chapter had one of the most distinctive styles. The sentences were short, declarative, often containing repetitive information cordoned off into dependent clauses that were then displaced at the end of the sentence. This displacement is intentionally jarring and sometimes awkward, but also the repetition of information had the tone of an ominous fairy tale, like the voice of someone trying to convey a horrible event to a child in the simplest way possible.

Instead of progressing any kind of plot, each chapter is more concerned with filling in every crack in the context surrounding a single place. Context over content, or context being the content. Also: extensive passages are dedicated to pure information (marriage rituals, property rights, land formations, etc.). Since I’ve been reading Walter Benjamin also, I couldn’t help but connect the two. Benjamin talks about how information has increasingly taken over traditional forms of personal and collective history:

The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication.

This information moves along like time itself, relentless and unceasing like the endless seasons’ demands and the gardener’s constant work. Meanwhile, it is only the reader, with the advantage of having the entire book within reach, who is able to piece together the different narratives into a story. For each generation seems isolated from the ones before it and the ones to come, leaving only traces here and there, the scent of camphor and mint, but separated off like a dependent clause at the end of a sentence.

We come to know time intimately as a character; and place as well, for the two are intimately bound:

Home! he’d cried out like a child that would give anything not to be seeing what it was seeing, but precisely in this one brief moment in which he hid his face in his hands, as it were, even this dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things.

In the middle of this book, the larger context of world history envelopes the smaller context of our story; we watch helplessly as our characters’ fates are dominated by the Holocaust and the war. We see time and place transformed by horrible events, distorted so that nothing is familiar. Nothing will be the same again. The consequence of linear time is its one-way-ness, we can never go back. And it is as if the novel pivots around this one point. We can never see these same places the same way, never associate them with the same uncontaminated memories.

This is what makes the book so tragic: it keeps going. We see the generations roll on, they deal with what they must, and soon even the horrors are forgotten and we, the readers, are the only ones left with the memories of what happened here, in these familiar places.

Two other notes. 1) The translation is excellent! Attention and detail and subtlety on the minutest level. 2) the Goodreads description says this was a bestseller in Germany. That blows my mind, that a book of this caliber and complexity can be so popular. Sadly, I cannot imagine it happening here in the US.

[Elcin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Son okumalarımda beni en fazla tatmin eden eser bu kitap oldu, muazzamdı.
Tek bir mekan üzerinde muazzam bir tarih şöleni!

Öncelikle çeviri çok başarılı. Orijinal dilde -ve sonrasında Türkçe’de- okuduğum bazı Almanca eserlerin çevirisinde şiirselliği koruyamamanın çoğu çevirmeni başarısız kıldığını görmüştüm. Dilek Zaptçıoğlu eserin şiirselliğini kaybetmeden bir çeviri sunmuş bizlere.

Basım yerine kadar ilk sayfayı okuyan okuyuculardanım ki en takıldığım orijinal addır bu sayfada her zaman. Bu kitabın orijinal adı, Heimsuchung yani felaket. Kök, fiil olarak düşünülürse de felakete uğramak. Orijinal ad, kitabı çok güzel karşılıyor ancak Türkçe ismi ne yazık ki karşılamıyor.

Gölün yanındaki evde/topraklarda el değiştirmeler boyunca süren bir işçilik var. Ve bu işçilikte bir bahçıvan, herkesin lâl sandığı ama aslında ev dışında her yerde konuşan bir bahçıvan. Hikayenin tüm karakter geçişleri bu bahçıvan üzerinden yapılıyor. Yıllar geçiyor, bahçıvan gitmiyor gibi. Anlatıma güzel bir bağlayıcılık katmış.

Doğa tasvirleri, içinde yaşatıyor sizi. Kokular, sesler, renkler… Hissetmemeniz imkansız. Karakterler, yıllar içerisinde değişmeyen tek mekan olan gölün yanındaki evde teker teker yaşıyorlar. En acıklısı ve bana göre vurucusu Doris, Kız başlığı altında anlatılıyor hikayesi.

Daha söyleyecek çok şey var ama her şeyi anlatmasam iyi olur :)
Bu kitap, yeniden okunacaklar arasında yerini aldı.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that is rather difficult to grasp and definitely asks for a second read. Erpenbeck brings 12 short pieces, episodes from different periods in the dramatic German history of the past century. The episodes are focused around an estate on a Brandenburg lake. But even those short pieces are chronologically scrambled, and regularly you get little details that offer dramatic relevance on the characters and time periods of the other episodes. What is clear is that the estate once was owned by a jewish family of which some were eliminated in the holocaust but others escaped, that after World War II the estate ended up in the communist German Democratic Republic and that till the end there was a dispute about the ownership (Erpenbeck plays cleverly with the different meanings of the German word 'Heimsuchung').

Meanwhile the buildings on the estate are inhabited by various people and renovated or extended, there are far-reaching interventions in the garden, and regularly there is also decay. The only character that connects everything is the gardener, but during the whole book he says not a single word, observing and performing the necessary operations, with faithful care.

Only very gradually it becomes clear that Erpenbeck has processed the whole drama and tragedy of the German history in this booklet. Not an easy read indeed, and moreover, the style sometimes is very dry and extremely detached, adding extra drama to the things she describes or suggests. This novel is an achievement without precedent, there is no discussion about that!

Tip: please also read the reviews of Ilse (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and Roger (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), they have eloquently captivated the spirit of this remarkable book!

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if the walls had not only ears, but eyes. Ah, the stories it could tell. But houses, like animals, are religiously circumspect. They are reflections, too, of their owners--in tastes, in care, in age. Visitation is the history of a house and 12 of its owners, a satisfying sandwich of time with thin layers between owners to talk of the gardener who cares for the grounds throughout. Set in Germany, the property reflects, too, that country's history.

When the house is built, Erpenbeck waxes poetic on house and home, how the wildness we call air gets corralled and tamed by structures that box it under the capable hands of the carpenters. Houses, too, have personalities mirroring quirks of the owner. Maybe an iron bird on the rail of a porch overlooking field and lake. Maybe a hidden closet that opens sesame at the bidding of owners who know its secret latch.

Time and the war bring different owners. Fates ordinary and cruel find the various owners. And the reader recognizes commonalities in the structure, the grounds, the plants. Oh. And the gardener, who works first for this owner then that one like a secret owner himself.

It's a wonderfully creative piece, slow to start, true, with some wonderful descriptions. You cannot become attached to any one owner, certainly, but over time you grow sentimental about the property itself, almost as if it were some property in your family, as if it had a finite life span itself (which most all structures do) and you were bearing witness of its narrative.

Here's an example of a previous owner still in the house while it's on the market, as an example of Erpenbeck's style:

What is it you want, her husband always said to her when she--now the illegitimate owner--spoke with him about the property: You had your time there. She had been unable to explain to her husband that from the moment it first became apparent that she would not grow old in this house, her past had begun to send out its tendrils everywhere behind her, and that although she had long since become an adult, her beautiful childhood had begun, all these many years later, to outstrip her, growing far taller than she was--it was turning into a beautiful prison that might lock her away forever. As if with ropes, time was tying this place down right where it was, tying the earth down tightly to itself and tying her to this earth, and as for her childhood friend--who she hadn't seen in over nine years now and would probably never see again--it was tying the two of them together forever.

A house concrete as a home abstract, then. One capable of conspiring with time to make you a beautiful prisoner. I like it....

[Sinem A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bu kadar kısa bu kadar yoğun bu kadar derin..

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is very rare that a book combines a mastery of language and cadence with an assured and innovative vision to redefine the literary landscape. Visitation is such a book. It is, to my mind, a contemporary masterpiece.

It will be widely compared, no doubt, to Simon Mawer’s The Glass House, because its property on a Brandenburg lake outside of Berlin is at the heart of the novel. Yet in that book, Mr. Mawer sacrificed characters to themes. In Visitation, Ms. Erpenbeck does something far more daring: she focuses on time and place as a constant, while each of her characters is (to quote Macbeth) “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.” She is absolutely unflinching in her ability to look beneath the surface to the tapestry of individuals who come and go while the shimmering lake and woodland remain.

Each of the characters receives his or her moment on the stage, with only one who consistently appears: the gardener. There is something soothing and reassuring about his constant reemergence, as he spans the seasons, adding topsoil, sowing grass seed, gathering fallen branches, coaxing nuts from their soft husks, stacking logs in the woodshed. He is a symbol of the cycles of life, spring, winter, summer, fall, always predictable, regardless of the temporary drama being played out.

To illustrate the temporal nature of all characters, each is only defined by his or her profession: the architect, the Red Army Officer, the writer, the illegitimate owner. There is one exception: the Jewish characters are named: “Hermine and Arthur, his parents. He, himself, Ludwig, the firstborn. His sister Elisabeth, married to Ernst. Their daughter Doris, his niece.” Indeed, that chapter – the Cloth Manufacturer – contains some of the most powerful writing I’ve ever read, as Erpenbeck uses cadence and repetition to move her characters towards one of the worst horrors of modern history.

On the chapter on Doris, Erpenbeck writes, “For three years the girl took piano lessons, but now, while her dead body slides down into the pit, the word piano is taken back from human beings, now the backflip on the high bar that the girl could perform better than her schoolmates is taken back, along with all the motions a swimmer makes, the gesture of seizing hold of a crab is taken back, as well as all the basic knots to be learned for sailing, all these things are taken back into uninventedness, and finally, last of all, the name of the girl herself is taken back, the name no one will ever call her by: Doris.”

Descriptive and passionate writing like this – in the chapters that focus on the gardener and on the Jewish family – is interspersed with the mundane elements and ritualsof life, for example: “Present exigency: The property that is the subject of the proceedings. Pending determination of ownership. Registration number 654.”

The language, in many cases, is like lyrical poetry. I must acknowledge the outstanding translator, Susan Bernofsky, who expertly translated this masterwork from German to English. For literary readers, all I can say is, this is why we read.

[İpek Dadakçı · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jenny Erpenbeck, keşfettiğim için çok mutlu olduğum yazarların başında geliyor. Daha önce “Bütün Günlerin Akşamı”nı okuyup çok beğenmiştim, yazardan hala en sevdiğim kitap bu ama Gölün Sırrı da çok iyi bir roman. Elimde “Gidiyor, Gitti, Gitmiş” de var, yakın zamanda okuyacağım.
“Gölün Sırrı”nda Erpenbeck, Doğu ve Batı Berlin arasında kalan bölgedeki bir gölün kıyısındaki bir toprak parçası ve ardından bu toprak parçasına inşa edilen evin hikayesi üzerinden Almanya’nın yaklaşık 150 yıllık tarihini anlatıyor. Yazarın kendi ailesinden de izler taşıyan hikayede görüyoruz ki insanlar hatta kuşaklar gelip geçiyor, ev değişiyor ve bir tek doğa baki kalıyor. Tarım toplumundan sanayi toplumuna geçen Almanya, ardından İkinci Dünya Savaşı ve Yahudi soykırımı, Rus işgali, ülkenin bölünmesi, Berlin Duvarı derken ülkenin tarihini evden gelip geçen ailelerin hikayesiyle takip ediyoruz. Erpenbeck’in gerçekten vurucu bir dili var, duygularınızı sömürmüyor ancak daha önce üzerine yüzlerce şey okuyup izlediğiniz konuyu öyle bir anlatıyor ki hem hayran kalıyorsunuz hem içiniz acıyor. “Gölün Sırrı”nda da oldukça farklı ve takip etmesi biraz dikkat gerektiren bir anlatım biçimi kullanmış. Oldukça farklı, çok başarılı ve çok sevdiğim bir roman oldu.