'Visitation' by Jenny Erpenbeck

The writing in Visitation is marvellously spare, subtle and evocative. By building intricate webs of sensed and particularized detail, Erpenbeck conjures the presences of the sequence of residents of a lakeside country house near Berlin, each carried there and borne away by the impersonal forces of twentieth century German history. By narrowing her focus in this way and eschewing grand action and encounter, she manages to reground history in the personal and the quotidian, which is, after all, where it is experienced as it happens. These accounts of lives clutched at and dissolved are alternated with descriptions of an unnamed gardener patiently working with the seasons in the garden or on the house until the whole place falls apart with nature and dry rot. Erpenbeck’s writing is like a memory so intense it casts off from the time it is remembered in and gains the immediacy of actual experience.

(June 2013)