German in the UK

Translated by Susan Bernofsky
Portobello Books

With the publication of her third novel in English translation, Jenny Erpenbeck is finally receiving the widespread acclaim that she deserves. Visitation was launched at Soho House in Berlin, but its reception in the UK has given Erpenbeck’s novel a home here, too.

The title 'Visitation' is an inspired translation of the original 'Heimsuchung', capturing the haunting undertones of the original as well as the sense of transience that pervades it. For the novel is the story of a house and its inhabitants, and the overwhelming sense is of impermanence and dispossession: these figures who people the house are just temporary guests of the millennia-old landscape. Just visitors.

The house is in Brandenburg, on the Märkisches Meer, and the novel traces its inhabitants and the events that it witnesses during the twentieth century. Short episodes focus on individual residents of the house – the wife of the architect who builds the house; the Jewish family that must ultimately abandon it; the East German couple recovering from Siberian exile; and more besides. The house, then, houses history; but these figures are not 'historical' in the first instance, they do not stand as ciphers for those cataclysmic events that took place on German soil throughout the last century. They have a life of their own, but you can't help but feel that the individual stories here, with all their tragedies, are being repeated in houses across the land.

Erpenbeck's style is extraordinary, and Bernofsky has done a brilliant job of rendering it in an English that retains the original's strangeness as well as its poetry. The layering and overlapping of history is reflected in the syntax, which washes over you in waves, as the phrases and sentences stack up against one another. It's in part from this structure that the sense of immediacy arises, where direct speech mingles with description, and where the narrative suddenly dips into microscopic detail and then rises again into broad brush-strokes. The off-centre perspective allows for moments of poetry, too – the architect's wife is defined by her laughter, so that when sadness arrives, 'for the first time in her life, weeping borrowed her body from laughter for several evenings in a row.' There is a lushness in the language that contrasts with the otherwise clinical tone of many of the episodes. And indeed, it often seems that the more horrific the event, the more matter-of-fact the tone.

So when the Holocaust intrudes on the house's tranquillity, it is without the least sensationalism. Markers of absence are the focus – such as the towels left hanging in the bathing house from the Jewish family's last swim before their hurried departure – and only gradually is the full horror of their fate revealed to us. The narrative does not tarry over their deaths but instead, true to the domestic setting, on the expropriation of their household goods. The lingering description of the meticulous packing and labelling of the boxes for shipping, only for them to be methodically unpacked, re-labelled and auctioned off to German families two years later, is one of the most chilling accounts of the realities of the Nazi genocide that I have read.

What's more, the movement of this passage, its compression of a long period of time and its chiastic furling and unfurling of the action, reflects the movement of the narrative as a whole. Erpenbeck's prose is constantly shuttling between different times, bringing the past into the present, filling gaps as it opens up others. The novel unsettles and enchants in equal measure, and stays with you long after the house has returned to dust.

Erpenbeck's novel was reviewed in New Books in German in 2008. For this and other reviews of the best new German-language novels, see www.new-books-in-german.com

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. She learned bookbinding, studied theatre and worked backstage at the Staatsoper theatre in Berlin before becoming an opera director, playwright and writer. Her fiction has been translated worldwide, and her novel The Old Child was awarded one of Germany's prestigious Aspekte Prizes for Literature.

Erpenbeck will be reading at Jewish Book Week in London on 2 March 2011, along with the Austrian author Julya Rabinowich www.acflondon.org, whose wonderful Splithead will also be published by Portobello in the spring.

Susan Bernofsky has translated works by Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse and Yoko Tawada. She is the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe and is currently working on a biography of Robert Walser. Her translation of Erpenbeck’s The Old Child and Other Stories was awarded the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.