A Small Press Book We Love: Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

Small presses have had a rough year, but as the literary world continues to conglomerate, we at Literary Hub think they’re more important than ever. Which is why, every (work) day in March—which just so happens to be National Small Press Month—a Lit Hub staff member will be recommending a small press book that they love.

The only rule of this game is that there are no rules, except that the books we recommend must have been published, at some time, and in some place, by a small press. What does it mean to be a small press? Unfortunately there is no exact definition or cutoff. All of the presses mentioned here are considered to be small presses by the recommending editors, and for our purposes, that’s going to be good enough. All of the books mentioned here are considered to be great by the recommending editors, too. If one intrigues you, consider picking it up at your local bookstore, or ordering through Bookshop.org, or even directly from the publisher.

Today, we’re recommending:

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
published by New Directions (2010)

Visitation sneaks a hundred years of history—as reflected in the changing owners and fortunes of a house on a lake outside Berlin—into 150 pages, all of them gripping. There’s the Jewish family who, under the Third Reich, are forced to sell the house to an architect, who congratulates himself on his generosity after paying them half of what its worth—the later chapter in which the family’s twelve-year-old daughter Doris is discovered and murdered by Nazis is the book’s most harrowing, and as deft a literary treatment of the dehumanizing effects of evil as I have ever read—and there’s the Red Army officer who later finds the architect’s wife hiding in a trick closet—this is the second most harrowing chapter in the novel, and possibly the strangest; there’s the exiled writer who reclaims the house after the war, and her granddaughter, who is forced to give it up during reunification. And there’s the gardener, who silently cares for the grounds no matter who the householder is, until he doesn’t anymore.

All of this is told in a spiraling, refracted, almost fable-like style, both in terms of the novel’s greater structure, in which each dispossession overlaps the next, the physical elements of the house showing through each narrative as through tracing paper, piling up, shifting slightly as we go, the bathing house moved to the top of the hill, the doors taken off their hinges, and in the cadence of the individual sections, where phrases and thoughts are repeated and worried, turned over like soil. The effect is to both collapse and distend time until all the souls in the book, most of them nameless anyway, exist at the same time, in the same place, forever. A collection of losses, a collection of lives. (Unless I’m reading too much into it, there is reason to think this is what Erpenbeck intends.) It is a novel about war and the grand march of global history, and a novel about the tiniest movements of the human heart; Erpenbeck manages to collapse these supposedly opposite lenses too.

I should say that I first read this book a decade ago, when I felt much differently about mortality and legacy and the idea—because it was then still just an idea—of grief. I found it perfect and sad and jewel-like then, with its many panes of glass making up a whole; reading it again this month, I have to admit I find it totally devastating. But still perfect.

–Emily Temple, Managing Editor