She recently named her four favorite new books for The Daily Beast. One title on the list:VisitationRead about another book Krauss recommends.
by Jenny Erpenbeck
I’ve been a fan of the East-German born writer Jenny Erpenbeck since I read her first work translated into English, The Old Child and Other Stories, in 2005. Her writing is marked by an utter lack of the extraneous, and bristles with a sense of the uncanny. Visitation, her newest novel, traces a ghostly parade of successive inhabitations of a lake house outside Berlin that Erpenbeck summered in as a girl, making for an intimate portrait of the century of Hitler, Soviet communism, and the fall of the Wall. Like every aspect of Erpenbeck’s work, the novel’s form is wonderfully idiosyncratic. Erpenbeck is an opera director in her other life, and here she divides her novel into voices—The Gardener, The Architect’s Wife, The Red Army Officer—that ping off and swallow each other like in a score by Meredith Monk.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
