Welcome to another month of German-language reading - November is here and that means that it's time for Lizzy and Caroline's German Literature Month event :) It's the fourth edition, and once again I'll be dusting off some books from my shelves and brushing the cobwebs from the German-speaking part of my brain...
While I'm not sure I'll be able to get quite as much read this year as I have in the past, I'm still planning to get to a fair selection of books, and that all starts today. Today's review looks at a new book for me, but it's one from a very familiar source, a writer that would be a great starting point for anyone interested in contemporary German-language writing :)
*****
Agnes was Swiss writer Peter Stamm's first novel(la), and it's an excellent introduction to his work, featuring many of the themes and stylistic quirks of his later books. The story is set in Chicago and features a (nameless) middle-aged writer who has come to the US to work on a work of non-fiction about trains. One day, while doing research in the Chicago Public Library, a young woman comes in and sits down across from him. Her name, as he soon finds out, is Agnes.
Naturally, the two are destined to become involved, but the book starts off dramatically, leaving us in no doubt as to what will happen to the heroine of the piece:
"Agnes ist tot. Eine Geschichte hat sie getötet. Nichts ist mir von ihr geblieben als diese Geschichte."
p.9 (Fischer Verlag, 2013)
"Agnes is dead. A story killed her. Nothing of her has been left to me but this story." *** (My translation)
Now that's quite a start. From there, we have just 153 pages to see how the two meet, fall in love and have things go horribly, horribly wrong. Nine months and counting...
For anyone who has read his books before, Agnes is very typical of Stamm's work. It's a fairly ordinary story with fairly ordinary people, but the beauty here is that he makes the ordinary seem unusual. He's an expert at drawing characters who have fatal flaws, something the reader gradually recognises is actually 'normal' - these are real people.
The narrator of Agnes is a typical Stamm man, from his laconic manner to his emotional coldness. He enjoys the anonymity of being a stranger in a big foreign city, avoiding making contact with people before meeting Agnes. This extends to the places he feels at home - his high-rise, hermetically-sealed apartment and the coffee shop where he is just another passing customer (he wants to go where nobody knows his name...).
Agnes herself is not without a few issues. Right from the first chapter, we sense her anxiety:
"Sie mochte die Wohnung nicht, nicht das haus, überhaupt die ganze Innenstadt nicht. Am Anfang lachten wir darüber, dann sprach sie nicht mehr davon. Aber ich merkte, dass die Angst noch immer da war, dass sie gewachsen und nun so groß war, dass Agnes nicht mehr darüber sprechen konnte. Sie klammerte sich stattdessen immer enger an mich, je mehr sie sich fürchtete. Ausgerechnet an mich." (p.12)
"She didn't like the apartment, nor the building, in fact the whole inner city. Initially we laughed about it, then she stopped talking about it. But I could tell that the fear was still there, that it had grown and was now so big that Agnes could no longer talk about it. Instead, she clung to me, tighter and tighter, the more she was afraid. To me, of all people." ***
As the story develops, so too does her anxiety, leaving her constantly on edge, unable to relax into the relationship. She's especially afraid of death, just the idea of ceasing to live causing her many restless moments. In several discussions (for example, on Stonehenge or about the narrator's books) she fixates about leaving something behind, making a lasting impression on the world before her time ends.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the couple's relationship is that there is a third corner to the triangle - and it's a literary one. The narrator is a failed fiction writer, and he is persuaded by Agnes to write a story about her, an ongoing work which gradually turns into a distorted mirror of the relationship. While the tale initially reflects the start of their time together, it eventually catches up and begins to predict the future; in fact, before too long, it actually starts to influence the relationship, becoming a major impediment to the couple's happiness.
More than being a record of dates and cosy nights in, the story is a symbol of the control the narrator tries to exert over the relationship. The narrator is like other male protagonists in Stamm's work; while not a bad man, he's rather selfish and self-centred:
"Es ist schwer zu erklären, obwohl ich sie liebte, mit ihr glücklich gewesen war, hatte ich nur ohne sie das Gefühl, frei zu sein. Und Freiheit war mir immer wichtiger gewesen als Glück. Vielleicht war es das, was meine Freundinnen Egoismus genannt hatten." (p.110)
"It's hard to explain, although I loved her, had been happy with her, it was only without her that I had a sense of freedom. And freedom had always been more important to me than happiness. Perhaps that is what my girlfriends had always meant when they talked of my egotism." ***
Having chased Agnes, he then has second thoughts, but the trouble is that he's playing with a fragile mind. He's not so much evil as thoughtless - but the end result is the same...
It's a wonderful read, definitely a one-day book (it was over in three short sittings for me), written in Stamm's usual, elegant, sparse style. He's a great writer for people who want to try to read in German, his work seemingly simple, yet subtly complex. Again, like his other books, the story often provides a warmth which quickly cools down, leaving the reader slightly wrong-footed, wondering where it all went wrong. A warning - Stamm's not really a man for happy endings.
The story is definitely a compelling one, though, despite the chill of its setting, starting and finishing upon the isolated 27th floor. It's a detached portrait of a woman with issues, and a man who simply can't understand her, but the background is almost as important as the people. The apartment, the library, the parks, the walks - all reflect and increase the mood of the lovers, warming up and then slowly cooling down again, the relationship struggling as the winter approaches. It's all very apt in the end...
Agnes is another great read from Stamm, a book I really want to reread when I find the time, and luckily enough for those of you who aren't quite up to the task of trying the original, it's available in English, translated by Michael Hoffman - as is his new novel, All Days are Night, which Other Press are releasing right about now! I've pre-ordered the German-language paperback original, Nacht ist der Tag, but I'll have to wait until December to get my hands on that one.
Once I've tried that, I'll have read all of his novels, but as he's also an accomplished short-story writer, there are still a few more of his books to try yet, and I'm sure I'll get to them all. You see, having enjoyed all I've read so far, it seems I'm destined to be a Stamm completist - which means that I might be back this time next year with a review of another of his books :)
One of my favourite contemporary German-Language writers is Swiss author Peter Stamm. I've enjoyed three of his novels so far, but Stamm doesn't just write long books - he's also adept at the shorter form and has published four collections to date. With not many of his novels left to try then, I thought it was high time I tried Stamm's shorter work to see how it compares to the longer books - and when better than during German Literature Month? :)
*****
Wir Fliegen (We're Flying)*** is a 2008 collection consisting of twelve stories, the majority coming in at somewhere around twelve pages. The style and language is unmistakably Stamm, with his clipped, simple language and the slightly uncomfortable feeling he evokes in his creations. However, the smaller canvas he works on in his stories means that matters come to a head a lot more quickly.
If there's a connecting theme here, it's one of frustration. 'Die Verletzung' ('The Hurt') is a story of summer love, with the boy returning years later to the village, only to be disappointed that the girl has become a woman who wants no part of him. In 'Männer und Knaben' ('Men and Boys'), a night-time visit to a swimming pool also brings back memories of a youthful romance, albeit one which never quite happened:
"Lukas konnte sich nicht vorstellen, worüber sie sprachen, er konnte sich nicht erinnern, worüber Franziska die ganze Zeit mit ihm gesprochen hatte. Irgendwann würde sie nichts mehr zu erzählen wissen. Vielleicht war das der Moment, in dem man sich küsste. Bevor man sich küsste, musste man still sein."
'Männer und Knaben', p.113 (Fischer Verlag, 2009)
"Lukas couldn't imagine what they had talked about, he couldn't remember what Franziska had talked to him about the whole time. At some point, she must have run out of things to say. Perhaps that was the moment in which you were supposed to kiss. Before you kissed, you had to be silent." (My translation)
Regrets - he has a few...
Several stories also look at the distance which exists between two people, a gap which can never quite be bridged. The first story, 'Die Erwartung' ('Expectations'), looks at a relationship between two neighbours, one which somehow never manages to get off the ground. There's something not quite right about the man, and the interaction between the couple is stilted (and slightly creepy...). In 'Fremdkörper' ('A Foreign Body'), this sense of unease is heightened when a cave explorer spends an unusual evening with a couple he's just met. Even in a moment of intimacy, Stamm uses the subjunctive, indirect speech to create a sense of distance.
"Das mache nichts, sagte sie. Das könne jedem passieren."
('Fremdkörper', p.33)
"She said that it didn't matter. That it could happen to anyone."
It's a structure that's more common in German than English, but I always feel that Stamm uses it deliberately to create a wall between the reader and the narrator - and the narrator and the people they are interacting with.
Stamm also explores the effect of traumatic events from the past on the present. 'Videocity' is a short piece which shows how a video shop owner has been crushed by the loss of his mother at an early age, and in 'Der Brief' ('The Letter') a widow finds out about her dead husband's infidelities and wonders how she should react to the discovery. Perhaps the most disturbing of these stories though is 'Drei Schwestern' ('Three Sisters'), in which a housewife with a passion for art is bored, trapped at home with her son. It is only when we travel back into her past that we realise why we should sympathise - and how many people have conspired to bring her to her current state...
Of course, there's always room, and time, to turn your life around, and two of the better stories look at this idea of a tipping point. In 'Der Befund' ('The Result'), a man waits for his biopsy results, using the time alone working the night shift at a hotel to work out what he wants from life. The title story, 'Wir Fliegen' ('We're Flying'), also follows this thought, with a childcare worker forced to care for a child after hours seeing her partner through new eyes - and it's not a pretty picture.
There's not a lot of hope and joy in the collection, but there is a kind of light at the end of the tunnel. The penultimate story, 'Kinder Gottes' ('Children of God') involves a priest in a small town somewhere (anywhere) in Central Europe. When a young woman falls pregnant, claiming never to have had sex, the town initially scoffs. However, the priest, an outsider, begins to wonder... Could this really be an immaculate conception - the second coming in his parish? The story has all the signs of an impending disaster, but it actually provides a happy ending for the collection as a whole. People want to believe, and it really could happen...
Overall, I found Wir Fliegen enjoyable, and there's definitely enough there to make me come back for another look at Stamm's shorter writing. Despite the piles of books mounting in my study, I feel another (virtual) trip to The Book Depository coming on...
*****
An English-language version, We're Flying (translated by Michael Hoffman), is available from Granta Books (UK)/ Other Press (US)
Recently, I've been neglecting my German-language reading, so I decided it was time to take a break from my review copies and library Spanish-language literature education, and pick up a book from my shelves. It's by a writer whose work I've enjoyed before - and it's a nice, easy read too...
*****
Peter Stamm's An einem Tag wie diesem (On a Day Like This) is the story of Andreas, a Swiss forty-something teaching German in Paris. He's lived in France for almost twenty years, and his life is in a rut. He's never been married, has lived in the same, small apartment for a decade and meets two regular girlfriends for no-strings attached sex on a regular basis.
Events, however, conspire to shake up his routine life in a way he couldn't have expected. A graded reader he is considering for his class, about a holiday romance, reminds him of his encounter with Fabienne, a French au-pair, back in his home village. Then a visit to the doctor to investigate a nasty cough leads him to face up to the fact that he's not getting any younger. Throw in an encounter with Delphine, a young trainee teacher, and Andreas' world is in a bit of a spin. It's time for him to take a trip into his past...
As I've mentioned before, Stamm's style is deceptively simple, and I'm sure that the (kitschy) graded reader is a bit of a nod to this:
"Die Geschichte war unglaubwürdig und schlecht geschrieben, aber sie hatte verblüffende Parallelen zu Andreas' Geschichte. Auch er war Fabienne nachgereist, allerdings erst nach zwei jahren. Sie hatten sich während der ganzen Zeit geschrieben. Andreas hatte den Kuss am Weiher nie erwähnt, aber seine Briefe waren voller Andeutungen gewesen. Fabienne musste gemerkt haben, was er für sie empfand."
p.29 (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011)
"The story was unbelievable and badly written, but there were startling parallels to Andreas' story. He had also followed Fabienne, albeit two years later. They had written to each other the whole time. Andreas had never brought up the kiss by the pond, but his letters were full of hints about it. Fabienne must have noticed what he felt for her." ***
At this stage of the story, the unwary reader might be tempted to say that Stamm's book is little better than the one Andreas is flicking through. The Swiss writer's simple style always has a sting in the tail though; the story unfolds slowly and carefully, becoming more complex as it progresses.
It's a tale of nostalgia, and a warning of the dangers of revisiting the past. Andreas begins to obsess about his youth, recalling his brief encounter with Fabienne and his return home for his father's funeral. Even an old postcard is enough to have him remembering the old days, an idealised image of what was - and what could have been. Gradually, he decides that the reason for the standstill in his life is partly his feeling of having missed his chance for love with Fabienne.
His actions later in the book though are to prove that nostalgia isn't all it's cracked up to be - you can't cross the same river twice (although at one point, he does, literally, and there's nothing on the other side of the bridge...). Which is not to say that this justifies the path he took instead, far from it. It's obvious that Andreas' life needs an impetus, and one has just come along in the shape of Delphine. Will he realise this though?
One thing Stamm excels at is writing real people, people you can imagine meeting and talking to, flawed people, not types. Andreas, like other Stamm heroes, is, well, a bit of a prick at times:
>>Du bist ein Schwein<<, sagte Nadja mit vollkommen kalter Stimme.
>>Ich werde dich vermissen<<, sagte Andreas. >>Man kann so schön allein sein mit dir.<<
>>Du bist allein, egal mit wem du zusammen bist<<, sagte Nadja. (p.84)
"You're a pig", said Nadja in a cold voice.
"I'll miss you", said Andreas. "You can really be alone with you."
"You're alone no matter who you're with", said Nadja.***
Every time we start to try to empathise with him, he does something selfish and stupid, whether it's abandoning girlfriends in the cruellest possible way, or flirting with his best friend's wife after the two of them have just had a fight. He treats women coldly and uses people when it suits him, and this effective characterisation, despite the simple language and plot, constantly throws the reader off balance.
I keep coming back to this idea of simple language simply because it is, well, simple. Anyone wanting to read something literary in German would be well advised to try Stamm as a starting point. He uses very spare prose, but the clear language somehow veils deeper ideas. One linguistic feature I noted was an interesting use of the subjunctive for indirect speech (rather than using direct speech) at times. It has the effect of distancing the reader (and often Andreas) from the other characters, enhancing the feeling of solitude Andreas already brings with him...
On a Day Like This is a great story of revisiting the past in order to get your future moving, and one I'm sure most people would enjoy. I have a couple more from Stamm to come - I already had Wir Fliegen (We're Flying), a collection of short stories, on my shelves, and on finishing this book, I immediately bought his first novel(lla), Agnes, too. Stamm was nominated for the Mann Booker International Prize this year, and I'm sure he'll pop up on more short- and longlists in the future. This is a writer you'll definitely hear more about - even if it's only on my blog :)
***All translations into English are my own sorry attempts :)
Today's book is by Swiss writer Peter Stamm, who some of you may know from his novel Sieben Jahre (Seven Years). However, the bus won't be heading to Switzerland on today's trip; instead, we're off to the frozen north. Make sure you're wearing your thermals...
*****
Ungefähre Landschaft (Unformed Landscape) takes the reader to a small village in the north of Norway, where we meet Kathrine, a customs officer who inspects Russian fishing vessels to check for contraband vodka. She has lived in the village for most of her life, and (as we are later to discover) has never been south of the Arctic Circle. Divorced with a child, she drifts along in a happy but monotonous existence, until she meets Thomas - who decides that she is the woman for him.
In less than a year, the two of them are married, and Kathrine's new husband, an intense, single-minded man, begins to form his new life the way he wants it, shaping Kathrine in his own image as he does so. She goes along with things for a while, but on discovering that her new marriage is all based on lies, she decides to leave, finally getting out of the small village which has been her whole world for so long.
Stamm's novel is about a woman who has been sleep-walking her way through life, burning through two marriages, and bringing up a child, without ever really being aware of what she has been doing. Her travels in the south (although pretty much anywhere is south when you start off in Norway...) serve as a kind of wake-up call, and a voyage of discovery for a fairly naive young woman. As she catches train after train, heading through Europe by day and by night, she sees different places and meets new people, even though none of it really makes an impression at first. By the end of the story though, her experiences have given her the strength she needs to make a new life for herself.
There are several similarities with Sieben Jahre, not the least of which is the simple, almost colourless prose. Stamm's style is deliberately slight and pared-back, simple sentences following one after another, falling into place like snowflakes onto the page. The thing with snowflakes though is that enough of them together can turn into a suffocating layer of snow, and the first twenty or thirty pages give the feeling of Kathrine being being slowly suffocated by the minutiae of dull, everyday life.
Another similarity with Sieben Jahre is the idea of a character with an unswerving obsession. In that book, it is Iwona, the Polish student, who sets her sights on the hero and simply won't let go. In Ungefähre Landschaft, this role is played by Thomas, a man who is trying to change the world around him to suit his desires, carefully removing any signs of Kathrine's individuality. He even attempts to alter reality, twisting facts to show himself in a better light - and Kathrine struggles to do anything about it...
The reason for this is that Kathrine, despite being in her late-twenties, has yet to really mature because she hasn't experienced life. When Thomas bursts onto the scene:
"Sein Leben war ein Strich durch die ungefähre Landschaft ihres Lebens."
p.31 (Fischer Verlag, 2011)
"His life was a line through the unformed landscape of her life."
(my translation)
By the end of the novel, thanks to her journey out of her comfort zone, Kathrine finally finds the strength to stand on her own two feet and decide what it is she wants from life. Nothing earth-shattering happens, but that's not the point. Ungefähre Landschaft is a modern Bildungsroman for a woman who learns that there's more to life than an unhappy marriage in a Norwegian fishing town...
When I first started my blog, most of the little German-language literature I read was confined to classics, owing both to a lack of opportunity (pre-Book-Depository days...) and a lack of knowledge about contemporary German-language writing. Over the past couple of years though, I have gradually built up a small library of books, and a surprising number are fairly contemporary, recommended either by small presses (e.g. Peirene Press) or fellow bloggers (e.g. Caroline and Lizzy, organisers of last November's German Literature Month).
One name which has continued to crop up is Peter Stamm, and when several reviews of his book Seven Years (Sieben Jahre in the original) appeared recently, I thought it was time to give this one a go. It's an interesting book, fairly easy to read (I raced through my copy in two days), but deceptively simple with a lingering aftertaste. In fact, it's a story which certainly stays in your head for a while after you finish it...
We begin the book with an image of Sonja, a beautiful middle-aged woman standing inside an art gallery in Munich. The reader is with her husband Alex, the narrator of the book, outside looking in, alongside his daughter Sophie. From this seemingly perfect beginning, the writer, through a story Alex tells to a family friend, shatters our illusions, telling us what life is really like for the couple.
To understand this, we have to go back to 1989 when Alex is about to complete his degree in architecture. At the time, he is good friends with Sonja, but nothing more, and on a summer's day he is enjoying a beer with a couple of friends and flirting with some girls at a nearby table. On a whim, one of his friends invites another girl to come and join them; a shy, quiet, dowdy-looking creature. This is Iwona, a Polish student, and this seemingly innocuous meeting is to have a lasting, and devastating, effect on the lives of many of the characters.
The key to Sieben Jahre is the incomprehensible, unavoidable compulsion Alex has to be with Iwona, despite not really liking her at all. After finally getting together with Sonja, he manages to extract himself from the quasi-hypnotic spell the Polish woman has cast upon him, but after the titular seven years (an apt time span for the religious Iwona), when she contacts him for financial assistance, he falls under her spell again, with catastrophic results.
Stamm makes it clear from the start that there is nothing about Iwona which should attract someone like Alex. She is taciturn, socially awkward and incapable of talking on any subject except the movie she last watched on television, and despite certain physical attributes which are foregrounded in the text, she doesn't appear to actually impress Alex with her appearance either. However, in her presence, Alex feels the one thing he perhaps misses from his seemingly perfect partner - a devotion and a desire to please that is literally an obsession...
If Alex doesn't sound like a very nice man at all, you're probably right. He's a selfish, brooding, self-centred husband, jealous of his wife's talents and unconvinced of the merits of fidelity. However, at times Sonja seems no better. The more the reader learns about her, the less convinced we are that she actually loves Alex at all. I had a strong impression that she merely needed a good-looking, relatively intelligent partner to share her concerns and give her a child - who that person was, and what they thought about it all seemed relatively unimportant...
When you then widen the focus to examine the other characters in Sieben Jahre, it quickly becomes clear that this is not a phenomenon confined to the unhappy couple. The beauty, if that is the correct word, of the novel is that none of the characters are that sympathetic. Rather than tutting disapprovingly and sending our good wishes in the direction of one character or other, we are forced to look more closely at the relationships and decide whether they are actually worth all the trouble. Everyone is to blame for what happens (some, admittedly, more than others), but nobody comes out of it with an unblemished character.
So what is Stamm actually saying with all this angst and misbehaviour? One conclusion you could draw is that happy marriages are merely myths, stories that shatter into fragments when scrutinised in the harsh light of day. Another is that happiness has little to do with monetary and social success - the reader is left with a sneaking suspicion that the happiest of the characters is Iwona, despite the misfortunes she has to put up with.
What he really means is anyone's guess though, even though the language he uses to lay out his ideas is sparse, simple and easily comprehensible for a non-native reader like me. There's a lot more to the story than you would think - a case of the sum of the parts exceeding the total of the individual elements. For me, at least, there's definitely enough there to justify another look at Peter Stamm's work at some point...
