How fragile is our sense of reality?

 Peter Stamm’s new collection of short stories, translated by Michael Hofmann, are interesting if only for the diversity of the main characters sketched in each:

—A middle-aged writer, snowed in at an artists’ residency in Vermont, recalls another Christmas and a woman he met thirty years earlier. (“Marcia from Vermont”)

—A young woman models for a sculptor but, disturbed by the finished product, she follows her double to the collector who buys it. (“Sabrina, 2019”)

—A teenager decides to rob a bank wearing a squirrel mask. (“Nahtigal)

—A woman, annoyed that her husband keeps taking work calls during their vacation, abandons him at a highway rest stop. (“First Snow”)

—A man, surreptitiously reading his wife’s email, begins to suspect she is having an affair. (“Dietrich’s Knee”)

Unfortunately, while these snippets indicate Stamm’s range, they say nothing about his writing, which is spare, clear as an Alpine lake, or the effect at finishing each story. It is often as if in each story we are introduced to the known world populated by perfectly ordinary people doing ordinary things—or at least nothing bizarre or unbelievable —when abruptly we are no longer in quotidian reality. It’s an impressive trick, and I’d like to know how he does it.

Stamm, born in 1963, grew up in Wenfelden, Switzerland, the son of an accountant. After completing school, he spent three years as an apprentice accountant and then five as an accountant. He went back to school at the University of Zurich taking courses in English studies, business informatics, psychology, and psychopathology. During this time, he also worked as an intern at a psychiatric clinic.

After living for a time in New York, Paris, and Scandinavia he settled down in 1990 as a writer and freelance journalist in Zurich where he has written prose, radio dramas, and plays. Since 1997 he has belonged to the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Entwürfe für Literatur (Drafts for Literature), and since 2003 he’s been a member of the group Autorinnen und Autoren der Schweiz (Authors of Switzerland). He has been widely translated; Michael Hofmann has fluently translated nine of his novels into English.

In a 2012 New Yorker interview, Stamm said, “It has always been my goal to make literature out of ordinary people’s lives. I don’t like the extremes; I don’t think that they teach us much about ourselves. And very often extreme or willfully original stories are just trying to make up for a lack of empathy on the part of the author.”

In each of these stories, the characters face a decision that will alter the course of their lives. He explores the spaces between reality and daydreams, between the choices his characters make, and the infinite possibilities that are lost with every decision. 

It’s Getting Dark plays with memory and time, even death, to indicate how fragile our reality really is, and how susceptible it is to tricks of the heart and mind.

Four octogenarians solve crimes on the Kentish Weald

Richard Osman is a funny guy and he’s written a mystery that made me laugh out loud.

The Thursday Mystery Club has four members: Joyce, a former nurse; Ron, a former labor leader; Ibrahim, a retired psychiatrist, and Elizabeth, who may not admit it but sound as if she is former MI6 agent. They are all elderly residents of the Coopers Chase Retirement Village, an upscale facility in the Kentish Weald, a scenic area in southeast England that includes parts of Kent and Sussex. 

The Village includes recreation rooms, swimming pool, beside which is “a small ‘arthritis therapy pool,’ which looks like a Jacuzzi, largely for the reason that it is a Jacuzzi. Anyone given the grand tour by the owner, Ian Ventham, would then be shown the sauna. Ian would always open the door a crack and say, ‘Blimey; it’s like a sauna in there. That was Ian.” Ian is the second murder victim.

Elizabeth formed The Thursday Murder Club (they meet on Thursdays) with her friend Penny, a retired Kent Police Inspector. Until she was incapacitated by a stroke, Penny brought files of unsolved murder cases to the facility’s Jigsaw Room, and she and Elizabeth would go over every case file line by line looking for anything the police might have missed. Over time, they called on Ibrahim, Ron, and Joyce for specialized help and then Penny had her stroke. They may have solved cases to their satisfaction, but no one was actually brought to justice. Then a contractor who happens to own 25 percent of Coopers Chase is killed and the club has a real murder to solve.

The Thursday Murder Club is Osman’s first novel. He is the creative director of a production company and is best-known in England as a co-host of Pointless, a game show where contestants aim to score the fewest points possible by guessing the least popular answers given by people in polls on various subjects. He has had  his own BBC quiz show,  House of Games along with Insert Name Here and Child Genius. He is a regular on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and Would I Lie To You. 

He told the Guardian he did not want to be seen as someone who just “dashed off a celebrity novel.” 

“I’ve always known how hard it is to write a crime novel and I have such respect for people who do it. I never felt I was in a position where I could do it properly and give it the time it deserved until about 18 months ago. I decided I would start it and once I got going, I found that I couldn’t stop.”

The novel was inspired by a lunch visit to a friend of Osman’s mother's in one such retirement community. “The setting felt familiar because you're in beautiful countryside but I was surprised because it was really busy with people everywhere. Then, when you start talking to them, aged seventy and above, you think, ‘My god, there's some talent, wit, wisdom and sense of mischief in this generation, everything is there.’ I thought this would be a great setting for a murder story. Let's throw the worst at them and see how they deal with it." 

They deal with seven murders by my count, but don’t hold me to that figure. It is stuffed with characters including the club members, two local police officers, Coopers Chase residents, figures from the past (the murdered contractor is a former drug king-pin, or maybe just a minor prince-pin). 

I expected book club members to grouse about the number of characters and the plot’s complex threads, but Osman is able to tag the characters so distinctly, most people I know had no trouble keeping them apart.

(Not everyone though. As one, representative Amazon one-star reviewer wrote, “The Thursday Murder Club is an amateuristic, long, poorly written mystery novel. There are too many characters, plot twists, and deaths. Most of the characters are flat and fail to attract a reader's interest or sympathy. The ending is convoluted and disappointing.”)

Still, The Bookseller reported that Viking acquired the novel and one other, “for a seven-figure sum, after triumphing in a ten-publisher auction in one of the biggest auctions of 2019. It sparked a string of deals across the world including a six-figure auction in the States.” 

The Thursday Murder Club reads a little like a TV mini-series treatment. Short chapters. Quick cuts. Multiple points of view. Snappy dialogue. It makes sense given Osman’s background. I would also go out of my way to watch such a series.

And The New York Times identified Osman’s second book, The Man Who Died Twice as one of the best mysteries of the year.

All of which is to say, The Thursday Murder Club is a hoot. Read and enjoy.

How do you explain the inexplicable?

Hervé Le Tellier has set himself an interesting challenge: To explain—or at least to write convincingly about characters who try to explain—the inexplicable. The Anomaly requires a willing suspension of disbelief, but Le Tellier writes so well and with such conviction (or his translator Adriana Hunter translates so well) that I, a thoroughgoing skeptic, was more than willing to go along for the ride. 

The opening chapter introduces Blake, an “extremely meticulous, cautious, and imaginative” hit man. Blake carries out his murder in the States and the chapter ends in Paris on Sunday, June 27, 2021 (watch the dates; they’re significant). 

The next chapter introduces Victor Miesel, a depressed author of literary fiction who, after experiencing terrifying turbulence on an Air France flight to New York—a flight that Blake was also on—writes a new novel “as if following dictation.” It’s his seventh and will be called The anomaly. He sends it to his editor and falls or jumps from his balcony, killing himself on April 22, 2021.

The next chapter, dated June 28, 2021, introduces Lucie Bogaert, a film editor, who is the lover of André Vannier, an architect. André “looked about fifty, but who could well have been older.” He is at least twenty years older than Lucie. They too are on the harrowing Air France flight, and when they return to Paris, “slowly everything started to sour.”

In the next chapter, dated May 28, 2021, a character named David learns from his oncologist brother that he has inoperable Stage 4 pancreatic cancer that has metastasized into his liver and small intestine. In other words, a death sentence.

What do these people have in common? They are all on Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York that after flying through a violent and unforeseen thunderstorm lands at JFK on March 10, 2021.

They are also on Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York that requests emergency landing instructions from Kennedy Approach on Wednesday, June 24, 2021— a hundred and six days later. It’s the same Boeing 787, the same crew, the same passengers, and the same hail damage from an identical storm. Rather than allow a plane that cannot exist land at JFK, the government directs it to McGuire Air Force base outside Trenton, NJ, and cordons it off to figure out what happened.

A mathematician brought in to explain compares the situation to being asked the possible outcomes of flipping a coin. Heads, tails, and the remote chance of the coin resting on its side. But what “if the flipped coin stays suspended in the air?” What if 250 duplicates of random airplane passengers abruptly pop into existence?

As The New York Times reported, Le Tellier has long been fascinated by the idea of the double. “Returning home one evening, he thought: ‘It would be interesting if I found my double awaiting me. How would I react?’ This was the genesis of a book he took one year to write.”

He said he inverted the usual approach in a novel, “where you invent a character and plunge that character into a situation. Instead, I took the situation as my starting point, one that would allow me to confront seven or eight characters with their doubles, after 106 days have elapsed. A lot can happen in 106 days! How would different characters react?”

Le Tellier, 64, is a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic, and teacher. He’s published fifteen books of stories, essays, and novels, none of which made best-seller lists. The Anomaly was an enormous best-seller in France (more than a million copies), and won the 2020 Goncourt prize.

“I am surprised by the book’s success given that it’s so experimental, bizarre and a little crazy,” Le Tellier told the Tines. “Perhaps reading it was a means of escape.”

Because Le Tellier is telling a number of stories in the novel, he cannot round out his characters thoroughly or give them much depth, but it hardly matters. He provides enough that we understand their situations and conflicts. In addition, he considered plausible moves by the US Government to control and explain the situation. Also, how would Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists explain it? How would mathematicians? How would philosophers?

Because Le Tellier is willing to engage in some philosophical speculation—what is reality? how do we know what is real?—The Anomaly is more than a boy’s adventure story. And on the last page we are left thoughtful and shaken.