If we can't trust our memories, then what?

I had to read Peter Stamm's slim new novel The Sweet Indifference of the World twice to feel confident enough write about it cogently.

It starts straightforwardly enough: After an introductory chapter in which the narrator describes visits from a woman who may—or may not—be an old girlfriend (and may—or may not—be real), he tells us that he has arranged a meeting with a Magdalena (Lena) in Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården cemetery. Lena is in her late twenties; he is at least fifty, although in the first chapter he seems much older: "My wheezing alarms me, it's an old man's voice, a voice that's just as alien to me as the frail body that imprisons me . .  . In my haste I've forgotten my cane, and I'm torn between my fear of slipping on the ice and falling and my other fear of losing Magdalena from view . . ." But Lena he's meeting in Stockholm is not the one who visits him in chapter one (I don't think); it's another Magdalena.

In Stockholm the narrator introduces himself to Lena as Christopher. Lena tells him that coincidentally her boyfriend's name is Chris, and he would like to be a writer. Both Lena and Magdalena are actresses. In the cemetery Christopher tells Lena that he used to be a writer; he wrote a novel about a disillusioned author: "The book was a love story, it was supposed to be a portrait of my girlfriend, but while I was writing it, we broke up, and so it turned into an account of our breakup and the impossibility of love. For the first time in my writing, I had the feeling I was creating a living world. At the same time, I could feel reality slipping through my fingers, daily life was getting boring and shallow to me."

So we have Christopher and Magdalena (Christ and Mary Magdalen?) interacting the past and Chris and Lena interacting in the present as the narrator tells his story. His novel's sales had provided a respectable income but more importantly justified the narrator's efforts to write it. He never admitting at readings or in interviews how much of the story was about himself. Asked about that, "I dismissed the idea, and insisted on the separation between author and narrator."

Which of course immediately makes the reader wonder how much of The Sweet Indifference of the World is about Peter Stamm. According to Wikipedia, Stamm books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 for his entire body of work and his accomplishments in fiction. Stamm grew up in Weinfelden in the canton of Thurgau, the son of an accountant. He spent three years as an apprentice accountant and then five as an accountant. He then went to the University of Zurich, taking courses in English studies, business informatics, psychology, and psychopathology while he also worked as an intern at a psychiatric clinic. After living for a time in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia he settled down as a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich in 1990. He's written prose, radio drama, and plays. I was impressed by his last novel To the Back of Beyond, which I reviewed in 2017. He's known for his cool and sparse writing style, all of which are represented in The Sweet Indifference of the World.

Which grows more murky. At the end of Chapter Three, the narrator is late returning to the hotel in the Swiss village in which he grew up. For a time he'd been the hotel's night porter himself. Because it's late he has to wait to be admitted. "Finally, I heard a door bang, and shortly afterwards saw movement in the corridor, the inner glass door opened, and a young man approached me. While he fiddled around with the lock, I saw his face next to the reflection of my own, but not until he held the door open for me did I realize that he was me."

When Lena in Stockholm questions the narrator, he says that looking at the night porter was like looking into a mirror. "Amazingly, he seemed to have no sense of the resemblance, of the identity. He gave me a perfectly ordinary greeting, and walked ahead of me to the reception desk, handed me my key, and said good night." The narrator sees his doppelgänger—who says his name is Chris—at least twice more over the years. Indeed, several years after the hotel meeting they visit the beach together in Barcelona where Christopher has been teaching German.

Stamm is playing with memory, reader expectations, and ideas about reality. In Barcelona doppelgänger Chris searches for Christopher's novel on his cell phone; it does not exist. Chris does a Google search for Magdalena's name and "actor." There is one entry on a drama school home page; nothing to confirm Christopher's memory of  Magdalena's successful career in a variety of productions. "Suddenly I felt an indescribable fury . . . There he was, imagining a quick Internet search was enough to rub out the whole of my life, as if only what was online existed."

As I said at the beginning, this is a slim novel, almost a novella (and when does a novella cross the line and become a novel? that's the kind of question reading Stamm provokes). It's not a difficult read; as Wikipedia says and as my quotations indicate the prose is cool and sparse  (the Michael Hofmann translation is impeccable). It evokes a profound question: If we can't trust our memories, what can we trust? Perhaps, as the publisher's promotional material says, Stamm is suggesting that our stories are not only already planned out, but wholly unoriginal as well, endlessly repeating themselves through different people. The Sweet Indifference of the World is a novel to read more than once for the pleasure it offers and the thought it stimulates.