Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

 

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was recommended by Lithub, as one of the best novels in translation from the 2010s. Technically, the book was first published in 2008, but not in translation until 2010, so it slipped in under the line. 

 

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in 1967, in what was then East Germany. Her life was in part defined by the Communist regime, then the disorientation and reorganization after the fall of the Berlin Wall 22 years later. It is difficult to explain exactly the feel that East German writers have, but there is definitely something. (My previous experience was with The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf - an excellent read by the way.) The best I can do is to say that the style is almost brutally dispassionate, with an intentionally flat and unemotional style that belies the reverberating impact of the events described. It is because of the calm style that the descriptions of brutally, death, illness, rape, and other traumatizing events have the dramatic effect that they do. It is vastly different from typical English-language writing, and yet beautiful and true in its own unique way. 

 

It is also difficult to describe how this writing style can so starkly avoid preaching yet be so effective at encouraging the reader to make the appropriate moral judgments. Both Wolf and Erpenbeck struck me as profoundly moral writers - morality is the backbone of the books, even as the mundane is usually what is described. 

 

Visitation is a book about humans, but centering around a piece of lakefront property in the rural area around Berlin. The stories are told in mostly chronological order, although there is a bit of jumping around. The inhabitants - the “visitors” of the property include the Weimar mayor with his four daughters, the family of a Jewish cloth manufacturer who either flee the country or stay behind and are murdered in the holocaust, the architect who purchases the property for nothing and builds a particularly fascinating house with hidden closets and decorations, the Red Army soldiers who occupy it at the tail end of World War Two, a writer whose family takes over the property after the war before the granddaughter is forced to return the property to whoever the heirs of the rightful pre-war owners were, and who makes one final trip to the house to close it up, before it is eventually demolished. 

 

As that list might indicate, there are some pretty rough episodes included in the book, although not all of it is unpleasant. But, you have a teen Jewish girl murdered and her body thrown into a pit, the rape of the architect’s wife by the Russian commander (told both from her perspective and his - and the accounts do not, shall we say, match.) Later, two children witness another rape. And there is the trauma of regime change that upends the lives of the ordinary people just trying to have normal lives. First the Nazis, then the Communists. 

 

Tying each section together is a brief story about “The Gardener.” He may be a real person, or he may be an amalgam of real persons, or he could just be a metaphor. In any case, he tends the grounds, and what he does at each point is described in loving and close detail. He is tied to the land, and when the book closes, he simply disappears without a trace. 

 

The book is fairly short - about 150 pages - but the print is small, so it is bigger on the inside. It also isn’t the easiest book to read, both because of the difficult scenarios and because of the unfamiliarity of the idiom. It requires close attention to each word, so fast reading feels fragmented compared to the more rewarding savoring of each sentence. 

 

There is also a lot of use of repetition throughout the book. Phrases (particularly in the thoughts of the characters) are repeated throughout a section, tying things together. I tried to pick one to use, but it would require quoting a page or two to give the feel. Just take my word for it - this is an effective literary technique as it is used by Erpenbeck, highlighting key ideas for each character, as well as giving a kind of cadence to the language, even in translation. 

 

Another thing that is recurring throughout the book is excrement. In the broader metaphorical sense, the gardener is constantly working manure into the soil. Everything recycles, the circle of life, death, decay, new growth continues. 

 

But there is also the very dramatic use of excrement in certain traumatic scenes. The Jewish girl’s location is betrayed when she has to urinate, and the urine seeps under a door to be spotted by a Nazi. The Russian horses trample and pee in the garden, even as the soldiers pee on the beautiful carved door. The architect’s wife is discovered in the secret closet by the Russian officer, and he sees an overflowing chamber pot. This is then followed by the rape, which involves her peeing on his face as he licks her vulva. It is a vivid, lacerating, and superbly written scene, and I can’t do justice to it without reproducing several pages (including his flashbacks to his childhood.) It is not gratuitous, but a necessary part of Erpenbeck’s art. The final one is when two children grow up together, sharing an intimacy which eventually fades as they grow older. 

 

By this time they’d long since learned what it looks like when blood flows out of a cut, they had even sliced open their own arms with a pocket knife so they would be blood brothers, and they also knew what it looks like when a person shits and the sausage first starts coming very slowly out of the hole and then quickly pops out and falls, under the willow tree beside the water first he, then she had squatted down so that the other could watch. 

 

It is one of those scenes that is written in such a way that very little is needed to convey the visceral feel of the close intimacy, and then the immense sorrow to the boy as his friend slowly grows up and finds other friends, and eventually a husband that isn’t him, so he is relegated to “my childhood friend.” 

 

Another scene that struck me is the one where the architect’s wife, years later, is telling a bawdy joke (kind of her way of coping with her own trauma of the rape and her infertility), and slips in something way too serious:

 

You know, I found it utterly outrageous for Hitler to demand that we women bear children for the state - we aren’t machines. And her husband says: In her own way, my wife was practically in the resistance.

 

I also have to quote this bit, about the Russian officer, who himself had the trauma of discovering his four-year-old sister drowned in the well by the Nazis, which fueled his reckless pursuit of violence. 

 

From then on, he had always been right on the front line, and at some point the driving-out had given way to a taking-in, and the defense of his homeland became a ravaging of foreign lands that he would otherwise surely never in his life have set foot in. Like a weed that is ripped from the earth and then thrown through the air in a high arc, he was being carried on by a force that lay outside himself, outside his still youthful body, a force that caused him to march and fight and seize in order to push the Germans further and further across the map, pushing them beyond the borders of their own country, all the way through Switzerland or France or Austria and Italy, further and further until they were shoved into the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, and plunging after them into the depths, sinking further and further to a place where both their movements and his own would be drowned in the same silence. 

 

Damn. 

 

That’s some of the best writing in the book, but Erpenbeck is good like this throughout. I should also give credit to Susan Bernofsky, Erpenbeck’s English translator, who makes the writing come alive in my own native language. 

 

I wouldn’t call this the easiest book, but it is rewarding in its own way. It really makes one think of the meaninglessness of war and hate and violence, as well as the impermanence of it all in the grand scheme. The land goes on, the lake will become a meadow, the house crumbles, then is torn down. It is we humans who are fragile and impermanent and thus valuable for our own sake. Erpenbeck brings this compassion and humanism (in the best meaning of that word) to a series of unique individual stories bound together by place.