Visitation is an originally German novel translated by Susan Bernofsky. Credit where credit’s due, it’s translated pretty well. You might think, surely it’s simple to translate a book, but you’d be wrong. The whole atmosphere and style of the novel has to be captured within, something that a literal translation cannot achieve. That being said, the novel itself is awful, well not awful, just not my kind of thing.
I’m really not sure that the author knows what a full stop is. There are more commas than letters. We pause for breath more than a fat kid running after a bully who stole his bike. I wanted to hear about the story, not to be told cryptically what happens through words that do not belong next to each other. Whilst an interesting story, it is told in a why that disinterests me. The main character is a house, and the story follows its inhabitants, with which there is one constant, the gardener. This really intrigued me, that and the short page-count if I’m honest.
But this book does not take a couple of days to read. It takes a couple of days to read one fucking page. Then another two days to decipher it. Then another two days to actually pluck up the courage to return to it.
This book is not a book. It is prose poetry, something that should not be done in this length. It got boring fast and too difficult to read. It is not worth a visitation.
Prepare to be Bloggled! 