In Visitation, allegory is toned down, history intrudes more explicitly, and the narrative canvas is bigger. The page count may still be modest, but the achievement and resonance are massive ... She immerses us so deeply in the worldview of each protagonist that we grow fond of them all, worry about the things that worry them, cease to see the things that they ignore ... Indeed, the amount of emotional engagement Erpenbeck manages to win from us, in a mere 150 pages, is just one proof of her mastery. In marked contrast to the unearned love that inflated novels so often demand, Visitation allows us to feel we've known real individuals, experienced the slow unfolding of history, and bonded unconditionally with a place, without authorial pestering or pathos-cranking ... Erpenbeck's German is poetical, almost incantatory, taking full advantage of the portmanteau words and Rubik's cube grammar of that language. Bernofsky opts for a smooth style that won't come across as bizarre in English, sacrificing some of Erpenbeck's verse-like cadences and delivering a flexible, accessible narrative ... an extraordinarily strong book by a major German author, ingeniously translated.

She omits dialogue and interaction almost entirely; each chapter immerses readers in the mind of the title character, creating gaps that can only be filled by later accounts of the lives of others ... Erpenbeck’s strategies—these concealments and gradual disclosures—create a subtle layering of stories that is the novel’s greatest strength. That said, one sometimes wishes that Visitation would leave a little more to the imagination ... Erpenbeck is as proficient at the delayed reveal on the small scale as she is on the large. She repeats particular sentences, allowing us to trace the dawning of our comprehension as she gradually reveals more through concentric descriptions and elaborations.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Visitation, can be read as a response or a companion to Sebald’s The Emigrants ... Like Sebald, Erpenbeck attempts to take the long view of modern German history, though her perspective is geological rather than historical ... The landscape, of course, doesn’t care who occupies it, and if the view you take is long enough then the terrible events of the 20th century that shaped these people’s lives begin to look rather small ... Erpenbeck’s aim seems to be to show an old-fashioned society on the brink of modern madness ... Erpenbeck seems to have learned a lot from Sebald. She writes in long run-on sentences and doesn’t always concern herself with paragraphs. Important plot elements and insights are buried democratically alongside commonplace descriptions and facts ... Erpenbeck has a sharp eye for unpretentious natural detail and pays close attention to the little repetitions necessary to hold a life together ... I’m probably not avant-garde enough (or German enough) to appreciate Erpenbeck’s work. The price she pays for cutting up her narrative seems to me very high: the reader has to work hard just to find out what’s going on.

Only the house and its silent gardener remain constant. Inhabitants come and go – the departees rarely of their own volition. Their fates, unfailingly related, make painful reading. Time drifts past in a dreamlike way – one minute it’s 1892, then three pages later the boxer Max Schmeling has knocked out Joe Louis (1936). The many shifts in perspective are handled with immense skill ... Though just 150 pages long, Visitation has the epic trajectory of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. This impressive achievement is a deeply engaging panorama of Germany’s troubling 20th-century history.

With this novel, something vast shifts underfoot in Erpenbeck’s miniature worlds: the tectonic undertow of geologic time. Visitation adds to her compact scenarios something intangible and enormous, which works on them from outside their modest frames with a force eroding human history and its claims to establish durable meaning ... Because in Visitation Erpenbeck flits between so many stories and perspectives, there is as much room for confusion as mystery ... From the novel’s broad, outside-in perspective, the human lives Erpenbeck takes as her material can grow insectlike, their activities as insignificant as flies in summer. The diminution of the characters places them at a distance from the reader, who cannot at this critical remove feel the causes of their laughter and pleasure, cannot empathize with their physical and emotional pain ... The horrors, disappointments and innocent pleasures that befall these and the fifteen or so other characters—the experiences they are made to watch or take part in—are too often rushed through, shortchanged, sometimes even exploited.

In Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck shows that it doesn't require a great aristocratic pile to draw readers into another world ... It's a Who Do You Think You Are? for bricks and mortar; a lineage of hope, despair, love and tragedy framed by an architect's dream weekend home ... Each story is followed by glimpses into the seasonal life of the local gardener. The result is a strangely ethereal fairy tale of the Reich-scarred, Stasi-suppressed era and its lingering hangover ... Erpenbeck has a lovely way of conjuring bittersweet images out of plaintive language ... If Visitation has a central theme, it appears to be that everything is temporary but that history will judge whether your part in the proceedings was morally sound. A Brandenburg lake house proves to be a memorable courtroom for this arbitration into the lives of others.

As the land is divided up, so is Erpenbeck’s book. Each character initially seems to be isolated into a discrete story, just as most are, at one time or other, enclosed in a confined space – a wardrobe, an oven, a prison cell. The most poignant version is, inevitably, that of Jewish Doris, who hides, and dies, in a pitch-black closet in the Warsaw Ghetto ... No story is given priority but each instead hints at the connections that place forges between various owners, renters and subtenants. Erpenbeck encourages us to act like detectives, noting the re-emergence of previously insignificant details in new contexts.

Visitation‘s most arresting chapter takes place outside of where the house can bear witness. After the Warsaw Ghetto has been liquidated, the twelve-year-old niece of the Jewish cloth manufacturer hides in a broom closet or crawl space in one of the tenements ... Here Erpenbeck’s writing is at its hardest and its best, perhaps in no small measure because it returns her to familiar preoccupations. However, in Visitation, Erpenbeck manages to perfect her treatment of themes previously taken up in both The Old Child and The Book of Words ... Erpenbeck reveals a workmanship in framing the reader’s view and building her narrative in such a way that is 'made to measure'—and Susan Bernofsky’s instincts are uncommonly good in translating an author whose work is riddled with specifications ... My only reservation about Visitation is that it reads less vividly once it reaches the GDR, which is a pity when the house-as-surveillor strikes me as being an ideal conceit for the schism between private and public lives under Socialism.

...original and evocative ... Erpenbeck's elliptical style, rife with naturalistic descriptions of landscape and geology, is better at describing the physical world than the emotional life of her characters, but in so doing, she hammers home her basic point—that people are part of the same continuum as the trees and glaciers that come and go over eons, and that 'eternal life already exists during a human lifetime.'