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.