Visitation
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Visitation for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
One of the finest, most exciting authors alive - In Visitation, the achievement and resonance are massive - The amount of emotional engagement Erpenbeck manages to win from us, in a mere 150 pages, is just one proof of her mastery. An extraordinarily strong book by a major German author, ingeniously translated, produced with love. Michel Faber, Guardian
Product Description
By the side of a lake in Brandenburg, a young architect builds the house of his dreams - a summerhouse with wrought-iron balconies, stained-glass windows the colour of jewels, and a bedroom with a hidden closet, all set within a beautiful garden. But the land on which he builds has a dark history of violence that began with the drowning of a young woman in the grip of madness and that grows darker still over the course of the century: the Jewish neighbours disappear one by one; the Red Army requisitions the house, burning the furniture and trampling the garden; a young East German attempts to swim his way to freedom in the West; a couple return from brutal exile in Siberia and leave the house to their granddaughter, who is forced to relinquish her claim upon it and sell to new owners intent upon demolition. Reaching far into the past, and recovering what was lost and what was buried, Jenny Erpenbeck tells an exquisitely crafted, stealthily chilling story of a house and its inhabitants, and a country and its ghosts.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a beautifully written and haunting novella that captures the essence of German history over the last century. The rise of nazism, the fate of Jewish citizens, and the tyranny of the Soviet era rule (in East Germany) is captured in a unique manner by Jenny Erpenbeck. This is a story that lingers on after you've turned the last page. The focus of most of the story is a place, a location ("someone who builds something is affixing his life to the earth"); and apart from one character, the gardener, the story of Germany's 20th century history unfolds in this one place: a wood, a lake and a community. Yet the mood of the writing is so wonderful and evocative that you are drawn into the lives of the characters. Simply stunning.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I liked Jenny Erpenbeck's "The Old Child" (see my review), but was often irritated by "Visitation", by the "poetic" prose with its mannerisms (including many commas where there should be full stops) and repetitiveness, by the pointlessly unchronological nature of the narrative particularly pointless, and by the rather arch way in which explanations are delayed or occasionally withheld altogether. Most of the characters are given no names, so it often takes time to work out to whom "he" or "she" refers; and in any case only a few of them are interesting or have any personality.
That said, there are a couple of graphic and powerful passages.
On a plot of land on the banks of a beautiful lake east of Berlin is sold off some time before 1933 in three parcels: one to a Jewish clothmaker who builds a house on it; the second to a Berlin architect who does likewise; a third to a coffee and tea importer. The novel then describes (as I said, it unchronological order), the harrowing fate of the Jewish family; the architect acquires their house, too. (We are never told what happens on the third plot). Then the war breaks out; and by the end of it the Russians reach the area: the architect was away at the time, but his wife was not.
Other tenants and sub-tenants float through the properties, each with their own story of what had happened to them under the Third Reich, the war, the DDR, or after reunification. The only continuity is the natural scenery, represented, I thought, by the taciturn Gardener who appears in every other chapter and whose seasonal activities are described repetitively. Towards the end of the book the Gardener fades away and the human constructs - the gardens and the buildings, both of which have frequently and repetitively described in great detail - decay and so does the house. Obviously a metaphor for something or other. I have obviously missed a lot of what is supposed to be the point of this book which has won such high praise from so many reviewers.
That said, there are a couple of graphic and powerful passages.
On a plot of land on the banks of a beautiful lake east of Berlin is sold off some time before 1933 in three parcels: one to a Jewish clothmaker who builds a house on it; the second to a Berlin architect who does likewise; a third to a coffee and tea importer. The novel then describes (as I said, it unchronological order), the harrowing fate of the Jewish family; the architect acquires their house, too. (We are never told what happens on the third plot). Then the war breaks out; and by the end of it the Russians reach the area: the architect was away at the time, but his wife was not.
Other tenants and sub-tenants float through the properties, each with their own story of what had happened to them under the Third Reich, the war, the DDR, or after reunification. The only continuity is the natural scenery, represented, I thought, by the taciturn Gardener who appears in every other chapter and whose seasonal activities are described repetitively. Towards the end of the book the Gardener fades away and the human constructs - the gardens and the buildings, both of which have frequently and repetitively described in great detail - decay and so does the house. Obviously a metaphor for something or other. I have obviously missed a lot of what is supposed to be the point of this book which has won such high praise from so many reviewers.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
'Visitation' is Susan Bernofsky's excellent translation of Jenny Erpenbeck's novel 'Heimsuchung', published in German in 2008. 'Heimsuchung' does indeed mean 'visitation' - a formal visit - but also 'plague', 'affliction' and 'infestation'. All these meanings will prove to have resonance. In English even 'visitation' itself, with its secondary meaning of 'haunting', has its premonitory side.
The place that we visit with Erpenbeck is a plot of lakeside ground in Germany that in the course of the novel and nearly a century of recent history passes through a number of hands and is the site of repeated building and rebuilding - the making and unmaking of a succession of homes. 'Heimsuchung' - literally 'a study or investigation of home' - is the underlying theme of the book.
Erpenbeck approaches her subject obliquely, in a succession of short chapters that each focus on a single character or family and their relationship to this piece of ground. In spite of the overt drama of historical events - the two wars, the rise of Hitler, the Russian occupation, the rise and fall of Communist East Germany - and their consequences for those who occupy this place, it is the place itself that emerges as the most powerful character of all.
This preoccupation with the existential relationship between human beings and the places in which they choose to live has deep roots in German thought. Heidegger, for one, seems to lie behind some of the author's patient descriptions of topography and the gardener's tasks and the themes that emerge from this act of attention. The slow rhythmic accumulation of detail, the steady deepening of emotion and the quiet way in which absolute horror emerges from the everyday reminded me of W. G. Sebald, and also of Walter Abish, author of 'How German Is It?'.
This is a book of great but quiet accomplishment that rewards slow reading.
The place that we visit with Erpenbeck is a plot of lakeside ground in Germany that in the course of the novel and nearly a century of recent history passes through a number of hands and is the site of repeated building and rebuilding - the making and unmaking of a succession of homes. 'Heimsuchung' - literally 'a study or investigation of home' - is the underlying theme of the book.
Erpenbeck approaches her subject obliquely, in a succession of short chapters that each focus on a single character or family and their relationship to this piece of ground. In spite of the overt drama of historical events - the two wars, the rise of Hitler, the Russian occupation, the rise and fall of Communist East Germany - and their consequences for those who occupy this place, it is the place itself that emerges as the most powerful character of all.
This preoccupation with the existential relationship between human beings and the places in which they choose to live has deep roots in German thought. Heidegger, for one, seems to lie behind some of the author's patient descriptions of topography and the gardener's tasks and the themes that emerge from this act of attention. The slow rhythmic accumulation of detail, the steady deepening of emotion and the quiet way in which absolute horror emerges from the everyday reminded me of W. G. Sebald, and also of Walter Abish, author of 'How German Is It?'.
This is a book of great but quiet accomplishment that rewards slow reading.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Not all it's cracked up to be
An interesting work of fiction written against German history from about 1900 to 1990. However this book hardly rates the rave reviews that it's had so far. Read more
Published 9 months ago by John Reardon
More German History Rendered Afresh
Over recent years a number of German writers have come to prominence through translation of their work into English. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Herman Norford
`Until the time comes when a different house will be built on this...
.. resembles itself once more.'
The central character of this novel is not a person, but a place. Read more
The central character of this novel is not a person, but a place. Read more
Published 14 months ago by J. Cameron-Smith
Everything is transient ...
An elegant and enigmatic novel about an area of land in East Germany where a house is built and the people who live in that house from before the second world war to after the... Read more
Published 17 months ago by P. Millar
"Colourful is only that what she can still remember, surrounded by...
"... her head [...] carries colourful memories, memories of somebody, who she was. Probably was. Who was she? Whose head was her head? Who owns the memories? Read more
Published 17 months ago by Friederike Knabe
Snippets of life...
Jenny Erpenbeck has written "Visitation", a short book of 12 snippets - almost short stories - but all about the same vacation villa located outside Berlin. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Jill Meyer
Lost in translation
The idea is a good one, but perhaps something has been lost in the translation. It's tedious and rambling, could have been so much better.
Published 18 months ago by leicesterlass
You had your time there
This house and its inhabitants, plus the timeless gardener, provide endless passages and interwoven threads - a clever concept but it did not work for me. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Singapore Relic
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
