Heimsuchung By Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck ☆ 1 REVIEW

Ein Haus an einem märkischen See – und wie ein ganzes Jahrhundert in ihm wütet.

Ein Haus an einem märkischen See: Es ist der Schauplatz für fünfzehn Lebensläufe, Geschichten, Schicksale von den Zwanzigerjahren bis heute. Das Haus und seine Bewohner erleben die Weimarer Republik, das Dritte Reich, den Krieg und dessen Ende, die DDR, die Wende und die Zeit der Nachwende. Jedem einzelnen Schicksal gibt Jenny Erpenbeck eine eigene literarische Form, jedes entfaltet auf ganz eigene Weise seine Dramatik, seine Tragik, sein Glück. Alle zusammen bilden ein Panorama des letzten Jahrhunderts, das verstört, beglückt, verunsichert und versöhnt. Heimsuchung

Imagine a geologist examining a cross section of a landscape. He would point out why this layer of rock is so compressed and why that one is less so, why this layer of gravel was trapped just there and what the shape and age of those fossils indicate. He would read the layers of the landscape as if he were reading a history book with illustrations.

Jenny Erpenbeck reads the layers of twentieth century Germany in a similar way. Just as pockets of petrified sand beneath bedrock can still display a wave-like pattern, immortalising the winds that blew accross the water which covered the sand long ago, Erpenbeck’s analysis is sewn through with heart stopping glimpses of turbulent passages in the lives of real people during significant moments in that period.

The book which results from this examination resembles a piece of art more than a traditional story. She extracts sections from almost every decade of the twentieth century and overlays them to see the patterns which emerge, just as soil overlays sand and sand overlays rock, or vice versa as occurs in the geologically unusual Märkisches Meer area outside Berlin to which the book is a kind of monument. It is not for nothing that she quotes Georg Buchner on the fly-leaf: As the day is long and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other.

There is one particular theme that she returns to constantly and which is beautifully symbolised by an old wooden door (incongruously leading to a broom cupboard), a door which is decorated with twelve scenes depicting the Garden of Eden. Germany had it all, she seems to say, wealth, culture, traditions, the horn of plenty. But it wasn’t enough:

Whether it was ’38 or’39, or perhaps 1940 when they began to use the dock belonging to the abandoned house next door, and when her husband built the boathouse beside the dock - she’s no longer sure when that was. Surely he hadn’t built the boathouse until the next-door property belonged to them, but when was that? Summer after summer swimming, sunbathing, and picking raspberries at the edge of the woods...and her laughter is the laughter of today, of yesterday...While she was spending her whole life laughing, her blond hair imperceptibly turned white...Today or yesterday, she is sitting with friends around a large pot in which crabs are floating, crabs she caught herself, gripping them firmly behind the neck, and later boiled until they turned red. Eating such a crab is not simple. First you twist the creature’s head off and suck its juices, then you rip out the claws and use a tiny skewer to pull out the meat.

The abandoned house with the paradise-paneled door is a symbol for a Germany that is gone; no one has and no one ever will become old within the shelter of its walls. In summer, he always took one last swim before leaving...When he will have swum here for the last time is something he no longer knows. Nor does he know whether the German language contains a verb form that can manage the trick of declaring the past the future. Paperback Home is where the heart is

Reading Neil MacGregror’s fascinating Germany: Memories of a Nation amply affirmed I still have a long path to go in the sighting of Germany’s history and literature. Sensing this need, two GR friends were so kind to bring Jenny Erpenbeck’s novels to my attention, in particular Visitation (Heimsuchung). As Visitation is fiction which is ingeniously connected with episodes from Germany’s troubling contemporary history, this short novel was a treat I could bask in, getting the best of both worlds, of history writing and excellent prose.

Eastern Germany, a plot of land close to Berlin. A lake. A summer cottage. A house. A garden. Behold the ostensibly idyllic and innocent setting where Jenny Erpenbeck, German writer and opera director, stages her magnificently imaginative composition, dense with props which seem so trivial in everyday life - clothes, kitchen ware, towels, sheets - but are fraught with ambivalence. In 12 slims chapters the subsequent residents of the house and adjacent land - mostly nameless characters apart from the Jewish characters, who significantly enough do get names - are grinded through the implacable mill of Germany’s turbulent history. With seven-league boots Erpenbeck clears a way through roughly 150 unsettling years, from the Imperial Germany, via WWII and the Holocaust, the Russian occupation of East-Germany, the Communist era to Germany’s reunification and its aftermath. Notwithstanding the breathtaking pace, Erpenbeck knows how to delight and grow the reader silent with her gossamer prose. Snippets of individual lives and domestic scenes and tragedies are daintily painted, subtly etching the impact of horrendous events, changes of regime, change of power rules and morals, on ordinary lives. The graceful prose skillfully contrasts with some brutal events dealt with. Cross referencing, creating an atmosphere of menace through unveiling gradually the horror by carefully stashing away hints in minor details in a previous chapter, connecting and entwining the poignant and tragic tranches de vie of the subsequent residents and visitors, the intricate structure of the novel resembles the hidden closets in the lake house.

The only figure which is constantly present and is not washed away by History is the gardener. Ineluctably, nature’s seasonal cycle urges the gardener to intervene, repetitively performing his tasks tending the garden, the intermittent sentences on his routines (sowing, planting, watering) knotting together the passage of the characters, taking the reader from one resident’s life to another, like the recurrent variations on the Promenade theme in Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition mirror the viewer pacing progressively past the paintings, until the theme merges in the movement and reaches its apotheosis in the finale, the Gate of Kiev.
What would you call home? Can one create oneself a lasting home? Does the act of building equals creating a place in the world? One of the characters, the Architect, ponders on his profession:

(…) planning homes, planning a homeland. Four walls around a block of air., wresting a block of air from amid all that burgeoning, billowing matter, with claws of stone, pinning it down. Home. A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothes. Homestead.

The German title ‘Heimsuchung’, seeking for a home, where one is safe and secure, exhumes the melancholy yearning of the characters in the novel. Almost all of them will be chased from and lose their homes and familiar surroundings, or even their physical and psychological integrity and worse, become effaced by the ravages of Time, like the slow decay and decrepitation of the house and garden themselves.

His profession used to encompass three dimensions, height, width and depth; It was always his business to build things high, wide and deep, but now the fourth dimension has caught up with him: time, which is now expelling him from house and home.

There is a poignant sense of contingency of human existence to this novel. Panta rhei. Everything is temporary. Time consumes and crushes man and his futile life and creations. Nothing last forever, apart from the powers of nature. Reading ·Karen·’s wonderful review on Erpenbeck last novel, Gehen, ging, gegangen which does divert from the historical take and deals with migration, a sense of evanescence seems a leitmotiv also discernable in her latest novel: regimes fall, and values change.

Albeit stylistically very different from the poignant oral testimonies recorded by Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets as Erpenbeck’s prose takes a much more distant approach, this novel also is a compelling account on the devastating effects of regime changes affecting people’s lives.

Paperback TRANSITI



La lingua scelta da Jenny Erpenbeck in Voce del verbo andare risultava semplice, diretta, trasparente.
Qui è invece simile all’acqua del lago sulla cui riva si svolge l’intera vicenda: increspata, sfuggente, quasi oscura. Richiede ben altro impegno di lettura.
Ma è anche probabilmente più raffinata, se non altro nella struttura narrativa che ruota intorno a un appezzamento di terreno, all’inizio un bosco, che lambisce un lago del Brandeburgo, stato della Germania nel nord est del paese. Potsdam ne è la capitale, Berlino non ne fa parte giuridicamente e amministrativamente, ma ne costituisce il centro geografico.



Terreno che un proprietario, il sindaco del paese (scoltetto), lascia in eredità alla quarta figlia, che per qualche ragione sceglie di suicidarsi nell’acqua del lago, proprio su quella riva.
E quindi, la terra, e la vicenda hanno una partenza drammatica.
Non sarà certo meno drammatico il percorso fino all’oggi finale quando la casa del lotto viene demolita nel capitoletto d’epilogo.
Prima di arrivare a tanto la vedremo erigere, trasformare, assisteremo al costante quieto ed efficace lavoro del giardiniere, personaggio silenzioso che attraversa tutta la storia e serve tutti i padroni che si susseguono.



Perché quel pezzo di terra, con quello che contiene, e cioè la casa, il pontile, il giardino, il bosco e il frutteto, la rimessa delle barche e quella degli attrezzi, nel corso della storia, che Erpenbeck sa far diventare Storia, si trasforma e s’adatta ai tempi. Il giardiniere innaffia, pota, sega, innesta, pianta e trapianta, sposta, costruisce, vernicia, in un’attività incessante, finché a causa di una caduta deve ritirarsi a presenza più marginale, meno incisiva, ma sempre spettatore. E forse il vero silenzioso narratore.



Il titolo originale Heimsuchung ha significato più composito di quello italiano, che però non è scelto affatto male, rende bene l’idea, e la interpreta.
L’originale tedesco contiene più significati, e non facile da spiegare. Mi pare di capire che si possa intendere come il penetrare in una casa, causando danni, provocando dolore, mettendo in moto la punizione divina, e il destino che fatalmente colpisce.
Quello che credo sia certo è che contiene afflizione, dolore, e rovina.
Caratteristiche che direi appartengono ala storia contenuta nel romanzo.



Dopo un prologo nel quale Erpenbeck condensa ventiquattromila anni di storia naturale in due pagine, un battito di ciglia, uno schiocco di dita, si passa al cuore del romanzo, diviso in undici capitoli con undici personaggi che qui sono protagonisti, lì sono invece comparse, entrano, escono, appaiono, ritornano.
Con loro Erpenbeck va avanti e indietro nel tempo, racconta il prima e poi il dopo, l’effetto anticipa la causa, prima il ricordo e poi l’evento, ma anche no, può invece scegliere il percorso più logico e lineare, si abbandona a frequenti ripetizioni come se volesse trasformare il suo racconto in una filastrocca, racconta piccole storie personali, storie di gente comune, secondaria, fragile, e attraverso di loro racconta il novecento tedesco, il secolo breve ma particolarmente violento, la guerra, quella Grande, i nazisti, gli ebrei, la guerra, la seconda mondiale, l’arrivo dell’Armata Rossa, la terra che passa di mano, diviene DDR, e poi il Muro cade, l’ovest si avvicina.



Per quanto storia squisitamente tedesca, Erpenbeck sa trasmetterla dando la sensazione che sia la storia di tutti noi, del mondo intero. E grazie alla scelta della lingua e del tono, la violenza, presente, tremenda, è però meno brutale, meno feroce, si ha l’impressione che faccia meno rumore, e il sangue scorra più silenzioso.

In attesa che nello stesso posto venga costruita una nuova casa, il paesaggio torna per qualche tempo al suo aspetto originario.

Paperback
Long time ago, in different time, in other era, when the world was young yet, when these hillocks were part of huge mountain range a glacier went through, crushing everything on its way, changing lay of the land, curving rocks and forming basins which filled with water. Former inhabitants, lions and saber-toothed tigers gone and then we entered on the scene, embracing that land and naming lake between hills the Sea of the Mark Brandenburg.

Between silent green hummocks, amid pine grooves and alder forests, nearby the lake there was a house. It was built by Berlin architect for his young wife. He used to think that it would last for ever, that they spend there the whole life. But what exactly does it mean that whole life ?

On the doors still fly colorful birds, flowers are blooming, grapes hanging. Garden of Eden, in twelve colored panes which beauty makes you to forget that behind them is only a common broom cupboard. Creaky stairs on the second, seventh and penultimate stage. Wife’s room as always smelling of mint and camphor. Dressing room with ingenious passageway into his atelier. On the upstairs from where stretched a view on the rose bed, sandy road, shiny surface of the water the tiny bird soldered to the railing.

A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. Homestead. A house made to measure according to the needs of its master .

Each and every year the gardener used to come and depending on the time of year planted, trimmed, watered, fertilized, cleared, weeded.

...he lives alone in an abandoned hunting lodge at the edge of the woods , he's always lived there , everyone in the village knows him , and yet he is only ever referred to by both young people and old as The Gardener , as though he had no other name .

There was a time and there was a life. And then time began to leak out and there was no way to stop it. And life began to shrink down to the size of a tiny dark cubbyhole. But while sitting in the darkness one could still remember that house and the lake, that one could be sure the world still existed. But what if there was no one who would remember us ? What when we finally disappear ? Who then will know about the world?

Doris, daughter of Ernst and Elizabeth .

On the wooden platform one can still hear the patter of bare feet, in the bedroom still lingers faint smell of mint and camphor, from the living room on the downstairs still coming the sound of a typewriter.

As the day is old and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other .

Trucks already departed, taking away tons of rotten debris, decaying wood, broken glass. The bees have left their hives. The gardener has disappeared. In the place where once stood the house there is a gaping hole now so you can see the layers of the bygone years. Slate, clay, sand.

In the twisted pines wind is blowing. The lake is still lapping against the shore. But one day even it may disappear. Because long ago, in another time, in different life, when the world was still young even in the Sahara there was water too.
Paperback The protagonist of the novel is a house, a lakeside property outside Berlin, which has witnessed history's mood-swings from its origins as a pine forest owned by a local town mayor back in the 1600s CE down to our present times when the knocking down of the Berlin Wall forced it to change its inhabitants once again. Before I say more I’d like to say a few words about our own house (a landed estate actually) located in what is today central Pakistan, to which I had been comparing the house outside Berlin as I read the book.

My family’s permanent address has not changed for the last +/- 350 years. My ancestors came from a town 150 km away and have lived here ever since, although in recent times many of us have moved out to big cities and to other countries, in search of new lives, but have always endeavoured to return to our place of origin every now and then, especially on festive occasions like Eid, and once every few years if living abroad.

The oldest part of the house dates from 1870s and the rest of what stands today was built and added in the 1930s. This latter addition was done by demolishing an old extended section that was originally built sometime in the early 1700s on fallow land. An uncle of mine added the latest amendments, a new men’s parlour and few guestrooms, in 2000s, in the oldest part atop a hummock which my grandfather had left to his elder brother and moved to a newer construction in the 1930s.

I can give more details, of constructions, additions, demolitions, caving-ins, earthquakes, Persian tilework, old furniture built to last generations (the old charpoys my grandmother had brought in her dowry, still in good condition after minor repairs); of births and deaths, disputes and disagreements, wars and famines, the place changing hands from Mughal India to an independent princely state, then from British India into Pakistan, through which generations of its inhabitants have passed. Many things have happened during that long stretch of time but no upheaval or misfortune has been great enough to dislodge us from our estate.

But humanity has a quarrel with reality, having for eons rejected definitions of it while seeking, with the craving of an addict, one more new interpretation, whilst destroying the world in its stubborn refusal to learn from history, all that presumably for the benefit of humankind. The house in Ms Erpenbeck’s novel is located at a place which has seen the worst of European history pass through its doors, defiling its peace, trampling its serenity, destroying its meadows, and, in a cruel joke, turning the lake as a dead end for the escapees than a spot of leisurely activity for holidayers.

There is a strong sense of déjà vu in each of the stories of its characters and their families, related at one time or another to the house, who have fought or traded the right to own and live on the property with each other sometimes on pain of expulsion, at times by force of exigency, yet at others when the right of ownership was first taken away, and then given back, in a back-and-forth circus of the last one hundred years, depending on which power system happened to prevail at the time. And amazingly, Ms Erpenbeck’s language corresponds closely to the confusions of history as it constructs itself, then disintegrates, and again assembles in a slightly altered formation, with a degree of repetition informing the similarities between its long line of inhabitants, as if words were recalcitrant banshees brought up in a knot to fill the air with their endless cries.

The new world is to devour the old one, the old one puts up a fight, and now new and old are living side by side in a single body. Where much is asked, more is left out.

August '16 Paperback

The central character for this novel is a house, a house by a lake in east Germany. It begins in the 1930s when the house is owned by a Jewish family. Through the various occupants of the house with all of whom the author creates an emotional engagement we experience the turbulent history of Germany in the second half of the 20th century. The one constant is the eccentric gardener who lives in an abandoned hunting lodge. I loved this beautifully imaginative and wise novel. Paperback oh, i love it when i get to review a book that elizabeth has just reviewed. as though i am going to be able to add anything to the discussion except a weak echo of i agree! this book is good!!

so i will just quickly relate my experience with this book which is indeed pretty great.

but not at first.

at first it was killing me with boredom. i have been reading too much teen fiction as of late, and there, the pacing is perfect for hot summer and slipping attention span. this book is NOT for those who can't pay attention. this is some highly concentrated, deliberate prose. and at first, before the human characters come into it, it seems to be just words words words, being boring.

but the significance will become clear later.

aside: i recently went to the movies to see general orders no. 9. and it was a small artsy theater, and the host of the evening (who i did not find smug, but connor said was, a little) prefaced the evening by saying it is hard to get people to come out for a film like this, a film without human characters on a friday night when you could be going to see the green lantern and that was supposed to make us feel good about ourselves, like we had made the informed choice for fiber over candy bars.

but seriously?
that movie is soooo boring. yes, city is bad, country is good, progress is problematic, i get it. take a note from koyaanisqatsi and have good music.

but i digress. the only reason i bring it up is because the arc of the book is similar to the arc of the movie, and starting this book the day after i saw the movie, i was apprehensive when it began with a glacier, and then moved on to a whole lot of talk about plants and slow growth. bad, synchronicity, bad!

line from film:

deer trail becomes
indian trail becomes
county road.

but in this book:

open land becomes
family house becomes
nazi toilet

that is not a quote, that is just the way the story progresses. and the book is just a damn sight better at doing what needs to be done. the details are perfection. the tone is completely detached, so whether the scene is someone pruning a tree or someone dying in a gas chamber, there is an emotional remove that only serves to make the reader's emotions more powerful. how she managed to write such a highly concentrated book is beyond me, truly. it is luminous (did i just use the word luminous to describe a book?? i think i did)

this book should be read slowly and carefully and thoughtfully. and then it should be read again. she is really that good.

greg's review is also good, and caused a great deal of fighting, which is funny, even if a lot of it has been deleted.

come to my blog! Paperback A 3-star level of enjoyment, but with 5-star prose, and 5-star moments:

This reminded me a little of Susan Vreeland’s, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, in that it’s a poetic movement through time by way of an object; in Vreeland’s, a painting, in this, a house on German land. And however linear our experience of time, this felt more like an art exhibit to me than a novel, where certain pieces by the same artist captivate and move, others delight, and others leave you flat at a glance, and you just want to move on - although the talent is clear.

The book takes you through German history from poignant moments in the inhabitants’ lives, with one character - the gardener - serving as an anchor, or a rest and return, as he tends to the land. We watch him transform through time, as well as the land, and the overall feeling is that however temporary our lives, we leave behind some intangible meaning.

My favorite chapter, The Girl, the single one inside a structure that is not this house, was profoundly moving, and worth reading on its own.

If you love poetic, spare prose, and appreciate intelligent literature that creates a connection with a society through its history, but rarely connects you emotionally to the to inner life of specific characters, this could be 5 stars for you. I’m just needing to connect emotionally more than ever these days…

PS I often read 2-3 books at a time, and I would not recommend that with this book. Paperback One word: brilliant. I just had some conversation on another review of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio . This book is similar, but more masterful. Sold as a novel, it is really more of a novel in stories, centered around a plot of land on a lake and a house that apparently German writer Erpenbeck's family once owned. This accounts for the visceral details and the heavy emotion that hangs around the events that occur during the historical time period in which this book takes place outside Berlin. It is somewhat autobiographical.

It takes a while to get into the book. At least, it took several chapters for me to get invested. So if you pick it up, keep going to the end. You will be rewarded, promise. This is the kind of writing that expands your mind. Don't give up. From the architect who builds the house, to his wife, to their daughter, to the neighbors (most of all to the Jewish neighbors, some of the most powerful passages I have ever read), to the gardener who weaves in and out of this desecrated Garden of Eden like a dispassionate god, Erpenbeck's experimental language and philosophical statements left me in awe. She has her own style and voice, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, who could bend time and events in one breathless paragraph.

This is a hugely talented writer, who is lucky to have found the perfect translator in Susan Bernofsky. A huge thanks to Bernofsky for bringing this masterpiece to the English-speaking world. It's a book one can read over and over and get something new out of it each time. In fact, I am going to go back to the beginning again now that I know what she was trying to achieve.... Paperback
Perhaps eternal life already exists during a human lifetime, but since it looks different from what we're hoping for - something that transcends everything that's ever happened - since it looks instead like the old life we already knew, no one recognizes it.

Yet, Jenny Erpenbeck demonstrates here that it is possible to capture the universal by examining the particular (like zooming into a Mandelbrot fractal image), amazingly in only a couple of hundred pages of personal histories succeeding each other in a patch of land by a lake in Bavaria. For me, reading the novel was like looking at a Seurat painting, like watching a time-lapse video or listening to a major symphony. I will try explain each analogy.


A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Pointilism is a late form of Impressionism, where the viewer starts from a distance, looking at ghostly siluettes like dancing shadows moving in a sunny landscape. As he comes closer and closer the observer discovers how the painting is created by thousands and thousands of dots in contrasting colours placed close to one another. To use a more recent analogy, I have seen on the net huge posters assembled from individual portraits of people of different skin colours achieving the same effect. Erpenbeck made it easier for me to make the association with Seurat, as in the very first chapter a young girl wanders into a forest clearing and has a vision of ghostly figures strolling through the grass, dressed in costumes from different time periods:

As the day is old and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other. (Georg Buchner)

The novel becomes a dance of succesive generations leaving behind afterimages of their time spent in the meadow by the lake, making the present a pointilist overlay that needs to be observed from a distance in order to perceive its deeper truth. Also from one of the first stories, this dance of generations is beautifully captured in the oral traditions and superstitions that are probably older than Christianity, going back to our common tribal memory. A collection of rules and traditions that gives structure and strength to a community by regulating all major events of a lifetime, from birth to weddings to funerals. This treasure chest of ancestral wisdom is getting lost in the uniformity of popular culture and globalization, but I grew up in a neighborhood when the parents and grandparents generation still had knowledge of all these quirky and enchanting customs:

When a woman gets married, she must not sew her own dress. The dress may not even be made in the house where she lives. It must be sewn elsewhere, and during the sewing a needle must not be broken. The fabric for a wedding dress must not be ripped, it must be cut with scissors. If an error is made while the fabric is being cut, this piece of fabric may no longer be used, instead a new piece of the same material must be purchased.

another example:

If a maiden wishes to know if she will marry soon, she must knock on the wall of the chicken coop during the night of New Year's Eve. If the first creature to emerge is a hen, she's out of luck, but if the rooster responds first, her wish will be granted.

These traditions endured for a long time unchanged, there wouldn't be much of a story if they were the sole focus of the book. Instead, the author chooses to zoom in on the period of rapid transition, from late nineteen century to early in the third millenium, when the whole fabric of society is ripped apart by world wars and major political movements, by alienation of newer generations from their roots and by the decay of the old fashioned system of values and ethics.

Given the big picture, the composite image I have talked about until now, I might leave the impression that individual lives count for little in the master plan, but the reverse is true, as each life contains within itself the seeds of eternity. An eternity defined not by stagnation but by birth, growth and decay. One after another, they enter the meadow, dance for a while in the sunshine, then bow out and make space for the next visitor: a rich farmer and his four daughters, an arhitect, his wife, a Jewish cloth manufacturer, a young girl who hides from the Nazis, a writer, an exile from a different country, a pair of teenage friends, some tenants, an illegal squatter. Most of them have names, but names are less important than their interaction with the place. The place having a life of its own, starting with untamed forest, then a summer house, then a houseboat, a dock, a workshop, a formal garden, a ruin.

A house is your third skin, after the skin made of flesh and clothing. Homestead. A house made to measure according to the needs of its master. Eating, cooking, sleeping, bathing, defecating, children, guests, car, garden. Calculating all these whethers, all these thises and thats, in wood, stone, glass, straw and iron. Setting out courses for lives, flooring beneath feet for corridors, vistas for eyes, doors for silence.

Linking the place and the people together is a mythical figure, the gardener, for me an avatar of a detached deity whose only concern is maintaining the continuity of life. He's the most important figure in the whole novel, so maybe I should try to capture him in more detail.

For this I'll use the time lapse analogy. You may have seen the result in wildlife documentaries: a photographer sets his camera on a tripod then, with a special remote timer, takes a series of photos at fixed intervals. When the hundreds of photos are reassembled in sequence you obtain a fast forward movie of clouds running like wild horses across the sky, of a budding flower opening its petals or of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, of the sun rising and setting in a couple of seconds, of seasons chasing one another with a tree in the center of the image blooming, reddening in autumn and then losing all its leaves. The prologue of the novel stretches the timeline even wider, following the slow dance of the glaciers as they shape the landscape, flattening the plain, leaving behind a talus of rubble that will be covered with soil and forest, and then parrallel grooves that will fill with water to create a lake. The speed slows down as we approach the XIX century, and the timelapse follows the coming and going of the seasons, the rising of the house and of its garden, the slow decay and dissolution that follows unerringly after birth and growth. The gardener is not only the caretaker of the place, he is also the indifferent observer who doesn't get mixed up in family dramas, in wars or in politics. Following a rhythm as old as the stars, he racks up the deadwood, cuts the old trees and stacks the kindling for winter, spreads the manure, digs he holes for new trees or flowerbeds, waters he lawn two times a day, morning and sunset - regular like clockwork or like the breath of the oceans from where life first emerged.

The gardener wheels up the next barrowful of soil and dumps it out. To tame the wilderness and then make it intersect with culture - that's what art is, the householder says. [...] To avail oneself of beauty regardless of where one finds it.

I am reminded of a phrase from Malcolm Lowry about a derelict garden in Cuernavaca. He too sees our destiny not as conquerors of time and nature but as gardeners, temporary tenants (Visitors) whose task is not to destroy, but to nurture and build (beauty, art, new life)

Le gusta este jardin? Que es suyo? Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!

I've talked about geological, seasonal and cyrcadian rhythms, about the drumming of waves, the whispers of the wind or the loud declamations of cannons. All these bring me to the metaphor of the novel as a symphony, where each individual character(the farmer's daughter, the arhitect, the writer, the gardener) sings his theme on his own instrument, but together they produce much more than their melodies: a tarantella of folk dance, an andante over the peaceful waters of the lake, a presto of cavalry charge and artillery, a requiem for a house in winter, an ode to the joy of living. Again the individual lives get lost in the bigger sound of the orchestra, but that doesn't mean that they are not important, that their theme songs do not reflect and enrich the basic structure of the opera. Here are the last quotes that I saved from the novel. All could be verses of songs, or sketched ideas for a haunting melody:

If I came to you,
O woods of my youth,
could you
Promise me peace
once again? (Friedrich Holderlin)

This is the key to the garden
for which three girls are waiting.
The first is named Binka,
the second Bibeldebinka.
The third's name is Zickzettzack Nobel de
Bobel de Bibel de Binka.
Then Binka took a stone
and struck Bibeldebinka's leg bone.
Then Zick, Zett, Zack,
Nobel de Bobel de Bibel de Binka
began to weep and moan.

The dandelions are the same here as back home, and so are the larks.

They knew nothing more beautiful than just letting the wind carry them along. Sailing is a beautiful thing.

In the end there are certain things you can take with you when you flee, things that have no weight, such as music.

That's what I will take with me from the reading of Jenny Erpenbeck masterful novel : an impression of light and shadow in a meadow, a timelapse of a house and a forest, a romantic symphony that says much more than words could ever capture. And, as with all those major Romantic symphonies and concerts, I'm sure a re-read will reveal more hidden treasures, deeper meaning and brighter beauty.
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