Erpenbeck's Visitation told the history of twentieth century
Germany as it touched upon one location; this book takes the various
possibilities of one life to tell a similar story. There are five 'lives' for
the main character, who variously dies soon after her birth, survives to die in
pre-WWII Vienna, post-war Moscow and post-unification Berlin. Erpenbeck shows
that our so-called 'fate' is to be tossed back and forth between chance and the
impersonal forces of history until we fall into the ground ("some
death or other will eventually be her death")
. In the earlier sections particularly, Erpenbeck's
writing is astoundingly evocative and nuanced, balancing vast emotional weights
on delicate, precisely placed observations. Such good writing, distilling the
incomprehensibly large in the affectingly small, is a pleasure to read.
(Jan 2015)
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