Tag: war

Visitation: worthwhile but read it twice

(L) Book Cover (R) Reed warbler feeding the fledged cuckoo chick with a dragonfly

Here are some of the ideas our group expressed about Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation.

  • Beautiful, elegant, spare prose that must be read twice–were the opening salvos from our group. It is a book to own—received it as a gift but had difficulty getting into it— ‘What in the world…?’ To follow, you must read carefully. My own lack of detailed knowledge of German history was an impediment to appreciating the nuances of the story. The enormity of content is only barely perceptible on second reading.
  • Even with two reads, it was not easy to appreciate her concept of time which she expressed as ‘a verity we can’t see, can’t hear nor touch’.
  • Read three times, and made the longest notes I ever made as a college girl, prompting my father, whom I was visiting, to ask ‘when are you going to classes?’
  • Built my own chart of events from prologue to epilogue while noting that even the differences between the prologue and the epilogue could be the subject of a session with the creation of the place finished about 15,000 years ago and the destruction of the home completed over 15 days.
  • Had difficulty obtaining the book but was able to read her essays Not a Novel…which I felt made me more able to appreciate Visitation when I did get the book.
  • A sheer joy to read!
  • I didn’t like this book although I was not able to read it twice. Initially, I found it enjoyable as it was like Hans Christian Andersen with its fable style and its repetitive phrases but after the tale of the wealthy farmer and his four daughters, I felt a disconnect. Parenthetically, our group suggested that the disconnect illuminated the author’s purpose, i.e., to have the reader appreciate the journey traveled by Germany through the 20th century.   
  • Except for Doris’s and the architect’s wife’s stories, I could not relate to the bare, dispassionate style, the nameless characters and the absence of dialogue in narrating this complex area of history. As a counterpoint, some members thought this style reduced the chance that the reader would be distracted from the main story.
  • The gardener is a constant, a time traveler upon whom we come to rely on this century long journey. Variously, we considered him an entr’acte, a calming device, a metaphor for the German people–with his orderly meticulousness, a symbol for divine source and a representation of the eternal versus the ephemeral.  We appreciated how the gardener built upon the bedrock. He said little, worked silently with nature and the owners—cultivating and conserving the property. ‘A marvelous gardener—in sharp contrast to mine who tells me more things that he can’t do than those that he can’, said one member. And yet, the property is carved up and the gardener sees it decline in parallel with his own loss of vigor—much like the losses sustained by individual states following the creation of the German empire, and subsequently through the occupation and division of the country. Interestingly, observed one member, the gardener seemed more human in his decline.
  • Rather than Germany, some thought it was more representative of East Germany which endured changes in area, borders, and governments along with a serious decline in resources following the Russian occupation and the creation of the German Democratic Republic.
  • The downward trajectory of the property triggered members’ thoughts of the contemporary issues of climate change and destruction of the natural environment. 
  • The book began beautifully with the story of the land formed by different layers that served as the foundation for the land and the subsequent homes, and the depiction of the culture with its superstitions, rules and classes that would evolve into the modern German.
  • Home was an important theme. What does it mean to people? How are they affected by loss of home?
  • While lacking a personal tone, the narrative was very poignant, and evoked empathy.  The incredible conciseness intensified the sense of foreboding. And while not really telling individual stories, the book recounted what happened to Germans over a century through the stories of what happened to a home.

Footnotes

  • The novel was published in German under the title Heimsuchung, which could be translated as “home-seeking,” although in common usage it denotes various involuntary ways of being visited: “infestation,” “affliction,” “tragedy”, “disaster”, “plague”, “haunting” i.e., “holy visitation” as in “Mariä Heimsuchung.”
  • The cuckoo heard in the background throughout the book is highly metaphorical as the cuckoo is a bird that makes no nest of its own. Rather, it raids other birds’ nests, dumps the eggs and deposits its own eggs in the nest with the result that the unsuspecting foster parents to rear the cuckoo hatchlings.

Our rating:

The Silence of the Girls: a heroic gesture?

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker caught our readers’ attention readily with Achilles reputedly saying to Apollo ‘But we both know if you weren’t immortal, you’d be dead’. However, we found reading became more difficult quickly as the material in the book was brutal—not life as a woman wants it—with women and children treated as chattel. Yet, perhaps due to the quality of the narrative, we were engaged. “I looked forward to reading a chapter or two each night when I went to bed.”

We were confronted with a grim portrait of male culture—fighting all day and drinking all night, and a hopeless picture of women’s life—enslaved, brutalized and toiling, where the afterlife was the main hope for solace.

We found the introduction of so many characters interrupted the reading experience—who’s on first and who is playing, and what was their nature—who are the gods, the demigods, and the ordinary mortals?

In a departure from our usual format, we explored how the book raised “Then & Now” questions. Firstly, we discussed the continuing use of rape as a weapon of war, and the recent report from the Ukraine where 25 women in an occupied shelter were repeatedly raped for the purpose of ensuring that they would never produce a Ukrainian baby. Our group lamented with sadness how this echoed the low value assigned to women in Homeric times and the reported contemporary concern that refugee women may end up being housed by predators. One member remarked upon the concurrence of infectious disease and war, the plague during the Trojan war and COVID-19 during the Ukrainian invasion, and the associated blaming games. We noted the remarkable perversity of Apollo as god of healing/music and plague/vengeance.

We debated the use of modern idiom to describe the sexual violence. Many found these descriptions jarring and questioned the need to use them. Upon reflection we, and possibly the author, realized we had no way of knowing what words the women from 1200 BCE would have used to describe those events and their circumstances. And recognized that the author wanted to be graphic about the pain experienced by the women. Furthermore, we appreciated that from the beginning of the book there was little evidence that the narrative language was rooted in the past.

“This is a very brave topic for the author to have chosen”, commented one member. Modern knowledge of the period in which the Iliad was written and the time in which the supposed events occurred is limited. It is likely that our knowledge of male culture during those times exceeds our knowledge of female culture. We can criticize what the author chose to develop and what she left fuzzy. Nonetheless, the group shared the concern that it was difficult to locate in the place where the action was happening and found the use of modern language a barrier to transcending from now to then. There was a suggestion that the presentation of this material in verse form with a chorus (like the original) might have been more appealing.

Many commented upon ‘missed opportunities’ related to character development but we realized that Pat Barker may have heard that we did not want to include a book with more than 400 pages on our reading list.